


another apple to slice into pieces

by Kirstein_and_Arlert



Series: do the math, expect the trouble [1]
Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Child Abuse, F/M, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-18 23:41:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 55,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirstein_and_Arlert/pseuds/Kirstein_and_Arlert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes much longer than his six years with S.H.I.E.L.D. (and a few more brushes with death than anyone's really comfortable with) but Clint finds a family, even if he wasn't looking for one.</p><p>Written for the marvel_bang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the marvel_bang, with [art by azuemonkey](http://thefixedfoot.livejournal.com/41288.html)
> 
> Thanks to the awesome krystalicekitsu, who was kind enough to beta this and didn't run away screaming when she saw the word count.
> 
> There are mentions of past underage sex with a dub-con element to them, as well as mind control (one incident isn't shown and is mentioned several times, but the other is more explicit). There are also a few mentions of rape while under mind control. Rating is for a torture scene.

**Year One**

  
**i. _because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore_**

The second Clint saw the cars and vans, he knew they were close. The area wasn’t exactly a hotspot for the sort of people who had the money to splash out on decent cars, let alone the sleek black ones. No one around here even owned a van, he only ever saw the patchy delivery vans that came once a week to the grocery store down the block.

Hunger gnawed at his stomach, but that could wait. It could always wait.

The important thing was to find somewhere to lie low for a while, and maybe some credit cards or bank accounts that hadn’t been frozen or cancelled by the guys who were following him. And somewhere with running water, because the water in the last place had been turned off less than an hour before ten men with guns had smashed through the doors and windows—Clint knew; he’d watched from a few buildings away. He needed a shower, water and money. A new bow would be nice as well. He’d had to leave his behind when he’d realised that they were closing in on him.

A dead man didn’t have much use for it.

He walked behind a row of battered old cars, his hood pulled up and his head down, until he could duck into a dark alley. It smelled like rotting food and vomit, but it was better than walking down the street, where he would be seen in a second. Clint climbed up onto one of the dumpsters and scrambled over the chain link fence, hoping that whatever sticky thing he put his hand in wasn’t going to poison him.

 

 

It took nearly an hour to run out of easily accessible alleys, even ones blocked by fences or walls at one end, and Clint was honestly surprised it had taken as long as it had.

His stomach rumbled again, but he gagged at the smell of the dumpster at his back, and swallowed hard. If he threw up, it wouldn’t help matters.

There was only one way out and, honestly, Clint didn’t like his chances. With his bow, he’d have had a chance, but he knew that there were at least ten agents nearby and all of them were armed. Even if two or three were driving wouldn’t be able to shoot him (he’d seen them work before, though, and he wasn’t about to underestimate them, he was still outnumbered: one against seven wasn’t a fair fight, even if he’d his bow.

Oh, yeah, his odds sucked and, if he was lucky, they’d kill him quick.

Clint took a deep breath, waited until one of the vans had turned the corner further down the street, and ran into the road.

The sudden, searing pain in his thigh didn’t surprise him, but he was surprised that it happened so fast and was in his leg, instead of in his back.

He stumbled, throwing one arm out as he tried and failed to catch himself before he hit the ground. It wasn't enough to stop him  biting his tongue and Clint tasted blood.

“Clint Barton.”

It wasn’t a question, which was nice, he decided. At least they didn’t go around shooting people unless they knew who they were. The man leaning over him didn’t look too threatening—in fact, Clint’s stomach jolted when he got a good look at the other man’s face. He’d seen this guy before, sitting in the hotel lobby when he was making his escape. He thought he was another businessman, killing time before a meeting or whatever businessmen did when they weren't in offices. Guys in suits all looked the same to him.

Maybe that jolt wasn’t shock, Clint thought (because he was pretty sure that he had looked at Random Businessman No. 1 for a few seconds too long the other day) and spat a mouthful of blood at the man’s feet. The agent grimaced, but knelt down beside him and used his tie as a makeshift bandage, so hopefully they didn’t plan on killing him anytime soon.

“You shot me,” he groaned, chancing a look at his leg and—yep, that was a lot of blood. “You fucking shot me!”

It didn’t feel like it was that bad, but it was principle of the thing. He’d been _shot_.

“I’m Agent Coulson and I work for the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division,” the man said, like he hadn’t just _shot_ Clint, and stabbed him in the thigh with a syringe full of something that made him feel warm and fuzzy almost as soon as he depressed the plunger. “We have a proposition for you.”

Okay, a proposition was either very good or very bad. It would be good if he accepted it, but bad if he didn’t. Or bad if he accepted it, like working with Natasha, which was how he’d ended up in this mess to begin with. Clint covered his eyes with one hand.

This was turning into the year from hell, and it wasn’t even June. God, he hated his life.

Looking between his fingers, Clint asked, “Couldn’t you have just asked me instead of shooting me?”

“You kept running.” Coulson checked his watch—something he was waiting for, or a deadline for Clint’s decision? “I have a file three inches thick that contains everything there is to know about you, from your birth, to the hotel you ran from three days ago—I don’t care about the criminal record or the thefts,” he added when Clint flexed his leg to see if it would hold his weight if he tried to make a run for it. No chance. It felt like someone was trying to rip the muscle out with a hot screwdriver when he moved it. “Those flyers at the circus weren’t full of lies; we’ve never seen anyone whose aim is as accurate as yours.”

Well, Coulson was right about the aim at least. There was no way he could know about everything, though, which was a relief. There was more than one thing in his past that Clint wasn’t proud of or didn’t want anyone to know about.

Coulson was still talking, still checking his watch every ten seconds or so, which meant that it was definitely a countdown.

“What happens if I say yes?” Not that there was any other answer he could give. He’d been called reckless, stupid and a hundred other things since he was a kid. He’d been stabbed and shot at (and now he’d finally been shot, so that was off his bucket list) but Clint didn’t want to die and he didn’t want to go to prison.

The whole thing reeked of a last chance, one final stop before he reached the end of the line.

“We’ll take you to our medical facility and have you checked over, then you’ll be taken to another of our facilities to have your abilities evaluated. If you pass the tests, you’ll be on probation for at least a year before you become an asset. If you prove to be particularly useful, you can even become an agent, provided your handler approves of the decision.”

“What does the Strategic Homeland... whatever it’s called do?”

Coulson just looked at him for a minute, and Clint couldn’t decide if he’d just slapped a target on his face until he spoke again.

“What do _you_ want to do?” Coulson sounded like he really wanted to know, not like when most people had asked him. They’d really been waiting for him to give them their answer and not his own. Clint had the fleeting, ridiculous thought that this complete stranger, this man who _shot_ him, might be one of the most honest people he’d ever met.

It was stupid, pathetic (it was every single thing that Barney said all those years ago) but whatever Coulson injected him with must have been the good stuff, because Clint looked at the blood on the ground, on his hands, soaking through the leg of his jeans, and said, “I want to help people.”

Agent Coulson, who looked so damn normal that it was almost funny, who worked for something that had a name that was too long for Clint’s frazzled brain to remember, didn’t laugh at him.

_That’s nice_ , Clint thought just before he passed out.

 

 

He came-to in what he was sure was a van, surveillance equipment lining the walls, with Agent Coulson tightening the tie around his leg—oh, no, wait; it wasn’t a tie, it was a real bandage now. The tie had probably been tossed in the trash. The leg of his jeans had been cut open right down the middle, they hadn’t even taken the time to cut down the seams. There went his last pair of jeans then.

There was a drip in the back of his hand and his leg felt like it was on fire, but there wasn’t any blood pooling under it, so he took that as a good sign.

Coulson had warm, gentle hands. Clint pretended that he didn’t notice, averting his eyes until Coulson rocked back on his heels and picked up a file. Clint chanced a look at him, but Coulson didn’t even glance at him, apparently engrossed in the file.

“A man walks into a bar,” Clint began. Coulson ignored him, so he tried again. “A man walks into a bar.”

“I’ve heard it.”

“No you haven’t.” He didn’t remember which ending that one had, because Barney had been going to tell him before he got called away, and the next time had Clint seen him, he hadn’t had a chance to ask before Barney had punched him in the face. Coulson’s expression changed just enough for him to realise that he’d said that out loud.

It was definitely the painkillers.

“You’re not going to send me to therapist and ask me to talk about my feelings, are you?”

“We have a department for that,” Coulson said absently, merely turning the page of the file.

“Is there anything you _don’t_ have a department for?”

“Alcohol. It’s brought up at least every six months, though.” He picked up a second, slimmer file, and dropped the first one in Clint’s lap. “These are the conditions of your employment, if you accept our offer.”

At least he had a sense of humour—at least that’s what Clint thought it was. He flipped open the file and scanned the front page. There wasn’t much there, just his name, his date of birth and that he would be employed as an “asset.” It sounded more like they were trying to buy him like they’d buy a gun. Then again, he’d been a weapon to most people.

He kept his eyes on the paperwork as much as possible, sneaking glances at the cuffs and the low doorway. Clint tested the handcuff around his wrist. It felt different to the ones he’d been cuffed with before, but he hadn’t been cuffed for a long time. They didn’t look quite right, either, too dull and the colour was different as well. Fuck. If they weren’t standard issue, it would take him longer to get out of them.

“Why does it say I’ll still work for SHIELD after my death?”

“Ask me that after you wake up in a morgue for the first time.”

He waited until Coulson left, one finger pressed to an earpiece Clint hadn’t noticed before, locking the door behind him, before he tried to get out of the cuffs. They were freezing cold and definitely not the kind he was used to, fitting together almost seamlessly. They didn’t feel like anything he’d ever touched before. Hell, even looking at them made him think that there was something _wrong_ with them. Strategic Homeland whatever had some creepy tech with them, that was for sure.

 

 

Agent Morse was sitting in the second surveillance van, chin propped up on her hands as she watched Barton through half-closed eyes.

“He’s twitchy,” she said, pushing her hair back from her face and settling down again. There was a plastic cup of tarry looking coffee at her elbow and a pile of gas station sandwiches sitting on top of a cooler full of bottled water. “Not very dangerous, but twitchy.”

“He thought we were going to kill him.” Phil searched through the sandwiches. Cheese and tomato, chicken tikka, ham salad, egg mayonnaise, tuna... whoever had been on the sandwich run liked their meat and dairy. He pulled out a pack of chicken sandwiches. They’d rarely ended up with any footage of Barton eating, but one of the few videos showed him buying chicken, so it was likely he’d either eat the sandwiches or pick the chicken off.

“We were. Fury’s called three times to make sure _he_ hasn’t killed someone.” She handed him a bottle of water. “Are you bribing him?”

“I’m feeding him. We’ve been following across the city and he hasn’t eaten since before we raided his hotel room. He didn’t have any money or receipts on him, so he hasn’t been buying anything.”

Morse smiled. “You’re a bleeding heart, sir.”

“Get back to work.”

“Yes, sir.” It came with a sarcastic salute and a smirk. Phil had never felt so sure about her choice of codename before.

 

 

Coulson walked in and threw the key to him. Clint _knew_ that there was no way he could have seen him trying to get the cuff open in the amount of time it took for him to walk in—for one thing, he was staring straight ahead, at the monitor, and Clint’s cuffed arm was hidden by his body and the blanket.

He looked up, searching the room the way he should have when he’d first woken up, and saw the tell-tale little glint in the corner. A camera. Of course they were watching him. They were probably still expecting him to try to kill them, or preparing to kill him if they had to.

“You could have just asked,” he said mildly as Clint uncuffed himself and crammed the cuffs between the bed and the wall, where they wouldn’t be used to cuff him again. Coulson set down a package on the table beside him and--oh, fuck.

He’d learned a long time ago not to take food from strangers; it had even been a bad idea to take food from people he’d known for a long time. Food was the sort of thing people usually wanted something in exchange for--and they usually only told him after he’d eaten. Or they gave it to him so that they could take it away later on. His stomach rumbled again, and Clint tucked his hands under the blanket, clenching them into fists.

“There are no strings attached,” Coulson said, pushing the sandwiches closer. Clint’s fingers twitched, but he didn’t reach for them. “I swear.”

With a final glance at Coulson, whose hands were now pushed deep into his pockets as some sort of reassurance that he wasn’t going to do anything, Clint reached for the sandwiches.

 

 

Watching Barton eat was an uncomfortable exercise in seeing how all the pieces Phil had gathered together had shaped the man in front of him. He ate quickly at first, one arm carefully placed so that he could make a grab for the sandwiches if anyone tried to take them, his eyes either on the table or on the food. It wasn’t until he started on the second half that Barton slowed down, still flicking the occasional suspicious glance towards Phil, then to the security camera that he’d finally noticed after Phil had returned. He didn’t say anything.

It all spoke of someone who’d spent most of their life having to either fight for the basics, or who was too used to having them taken away if someone decided that they didn’t like what they saw.

“Thanks,” Barton muttered, folding the wrapper up as tightly as he could.

Phil resisted the urge to get more food, trying to rationalise it as common sense. Barton would need more food, especially after losing blood. More food would make him ill after so long with so little; the last thing they needed was him spending the rest of the day throwing up.He settled for giving Barton his own unopened bottle of water. It wasn't food, but it was better than giving him nothing else.

Morse was right; recruiting someone he’d been watching for months had turned Phil into a bleeding heart, and he had no one but himself to blame.


	2. Chapter 2

**ii. _A dark-haired man in a rented bungalow is licking the whiskey / from the back of your wrist / he feels nothing_**

 

Medical wasn’t Phil’s favourite place to start a tour of SHIELD facilities, but it was the necessary place this time.

“This is Medical. Any injuries must be reported here and treated, if necessary.”

“If it’s larger than a paper cut, we need you to fill out a form,” Doctor Matthews added helpfully. “I’ll need your handler to accompany you if it’s a major injury. Anything involving damage to your eyes, ears or hands is classed as a major injury. Broken bones are only classed as major injuries if there are multiple breaks or if they happen within three months of a cast coming off.”

“Doc, Agent Sitwell pulled his stitches again,” came the exasperated shout from the next room. “Unauthorised training exercise, from the look of it.”

Matthews shook his head. “Excuse me for a moment.” He went next door, muttering under his break about _smartass agents determined to get themselves killed because they can’t follow orders_.

Barton picked at his ragged cuticles. He kept looking towards the locked door and Phil got the feeling that he was using every inch of self-control he possessed to stay in the room instead of running out. “Do I have to come here?”

“Yearly medical examinations, including blood tests, are mandatory for all agents.” He understood why Barton was wary; he’d spent so much time in hospitals as a child that Phil would have been more surprised if Barton didn’t show some negative effects. “If you don’t feel comfortable around the doctors, you can arrange for one of the nurses to draw blood.”

“It’s not doctors,” Barton muttered. “It—It’s all of them. I don’t like any of them.”

“We do have some agents who have been trained in basic first aid and who are authorised to draw blood from agents and assets.”

“Sorry about that,” Matthews said, stripping off his latex gloves and dropping them into the bin beside the door as he entered. “Now, let’s get that leg looked at. We could knock out the other tests at the same time, if you want.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really. I need to check your height, weight, draw some blood for a few routine tests and make sure that your wound isn’t too serious. I can get you a gown if you’d feel more comfortable in it instead of in your underwear.” Matthews had received the same mandatory training in working with victims of abuse and neglect that agents above Level 4 received. It was a sad fact that the higher your rank, the more often you would encounter someone with an unpleasant past, whether it was at the hands of their parents or a stranger who had brainwashed them to do their bidding.

“I can leave,” Phil offered.

“You can stay. I don’t need a gown; I’ve worn less.” Without any protest, Barton stripped down to his boxers, letting his clothes pool where they hit the floor. It was refreshing to see something closer to relaxed behaviour. He kept his head down, though, not looking at anything but the floor. Phil fought the urge to put his hand on his shoulder until he saw the scars.

There were scars on Barton’s shoulders, large ones with mirror images of them on the backs of his shoulders. Phil wondered if those were the ones that Barton’s old mentor Trick Shot had left him with. Judging from the very brief police report – bloodied arrows found embedded in a tree, evidence of human flesh and blood on them – Barton had had to force the arrows through his shoulders to minimise the damage. It would have hurt the more time it took, but the extensive scaring suggested that he’d pushed them through slowly.

“Plenty of identifying marks,” Matthews said, taking photographs of the scars and marking them on a diagram. He brushed his fingers against the scars and Barton flinched, taking a step back until he was leaning against the hospital bed. Matthews immediately took his hand away and took a step away. “These seem to have healed well. Did you go to a hospital?”

“Had to. I needed to be able to use my arms for my job.”

So he’d tolerate doctors and nurses when he absolutely had to.

As Matthews worked his way through the other exams, including a few x-rays which revealed a lot more healed breaks and fractures than had been evident in the last ones Phil had seen, he discovered more about Barton. His nose had been broken at least three times, one of them when he was in his teens. His cheekbones had been fractured once and two of his fingers had been broken and Barton had set them himself. His left arm had been broken when he was a small child, but had definitely been professionally set, because Phil had seen what that sort of break healed like without medical attention. He had more scars on his legs, including a nasty one on the inside of his left thigh, and more on his back. One of them looked like it had been left by a belt.

“Can you get on the scales please? Without the bandage, if that’s okay.”

Barton nodded and unwrapped the bandage from his thigh, not even making a sound when the fabric tugged at the wound.

Without the bloody bandage, the wound on Barton’s thigh didn’t look so bad. It was shallow, but rather large and had bled more than Phil had expected. Initially, kneeling beside him in the street, Phil had been momentarily terrified that he’d accidentally hit an artery before he’d realised that it wasn’t enough blood. It would scar but, in the life of someone who would be working for SHIELD, a scar wasn’t a very big deal unless it was a facial scar. That would have required surgery or, if that didn't work, the asset being restricted to jobs where being recognised was less likely to get them killed.

“A bit underweight, particularly for someone with your abilities,” Matthews said as he wrote down the number. “Not bad enough to need any supplements, but no skipping meals once your training starts. Coulson, can you put a note in his file for his handler?”

“He doesn’t have a handler yet; he’s my responsibility for the foreseeable future.”

“At least you’re in good hands,” Matthews took a photo of a scar that spanned the width of Barton’s lower back. “Let’s get that leg cleaned and bandaged, and then I can draw some blood.”

 

 

Starting at Medical had been a bad idea. While Barton had remained silent and unresponsive throughout the majority of the examination, Phil had watched him retreat into himself, the little progress he’d made with him after they’d first met disappearing before his eyes.

There was only one place in SHIELD that Barton had been authorised to enter that wasn’t currently occupied and had a chance of drawing him out again.

“This is Research and Development”, Phil said, and waited until Barton had stepped into the room before letting the door close behind him. It locked automatically, the fingerprint and retina scanners going dark. Dark, it would look like there was nothing beside the door.

“I’m warning you right now that if you touch anything and lose an arm or go deaf, it isn’t our fault,” Lawson, the head of the department, shouted as he screwed a plate into place on the latest prototype. Barton gave it a wide berth, but wandered over to look at some of the other prototypes. Lawson muttered, “Sick of having complaints on file because the idiots touch equipment they’re too stupid to handle. I’m a SHIELD agent and I don’t listen when I’m told that those things blow up, because what do geeks know about what they created?”

_When was his last psych eval?_ Phil wondered. He’d have to check.

“What is that?” Barton asked, climbing a spiral staircase up to the second level, where they kept the smaller transport vehicles. He’d left his crutches leaning against one of the railings and limped heavily, but he didn’t pause.

It took Phil a moment to realise that he wasn’t staring at the flying car (dented from when hitting a wall had been the only option), but what was beside it. “It’s a Sky-Cycle.”

“A Sky--wait, it can _fly_?”

“Sometimes. The rest of the time, it bursts into flames,” Lawson called, still screwing on the panel. Barton took a step back at that, shoving his hands back in his pockets. “We’re not quite sure why. Sir, what do you want us to do for him?”

“His specialty is archery; ask him what he thinks would be useful.” That was another thing he didn’t like about R&D they had a bad habit of going through handlers and senior agents instead of the people who would be using the weapons and equipment they were building. Barton didn’t seem to notice. He was still staring at the Sky-Cycle with almost childlike excitement. “Don’t even think about it. It’s untested.”

Barton looked like he was going to say something else, but he closed his mouth when one of the scientists called, “Falcon testing!” and everyone on the upper levels hit the floor.

He watched Sam drop from the highest floor, do a few laps around each level, the wings making so little noise that they could hardly be heard in the almost silent building, and land in front of Phil. He looked up towards the top level and gave Sharon a thumbs up.

“Are those better than the last ones?” Phil asked, although he could already see that they were.

Sam smiled, folding the wings back with a press of a button on one of the straps that ran across the chest. “Way better. They’ve even given me fingerprint recognition on the activation button--no voice recognition this time, but they didn’t agree to that easily. I don’t think I’d use them if they tried that again. Thanks for the Captain America file, by the way. I really appreciate it, especially since you’ve had the file for a long time.”

“Sam, there’s no one I’d rather hand it off to than you, and it’s not as if I’m off it permanently; it’s only until the end of the month. Just tell Sharon not to move the ferns in my office again.”

With a guilty glance towards Sharon -- Phil knew the ferns had been moved from his desk to just inside the door again -- Sam nodded.

“I’ll tell her to move them back?” he offered.

Phil smiled. It happened every time he let them use his office instead of getting them to use their quarters to fill in paperwork. Moving the ferns back when he got his office back was almost a ritual. He wasn’t entirely sure why she hated the ferns so much, but he suspected it was something to do with paperwork and how they’d met. “It doesn’t matter. I have someone I want you to meet.” _Please don’t be trying to switch on the Sky-Cycle when I turn around_. “Barton?”

“Yeah?” He wasn’t touching the Sky-Cycle, he hadn’t even moved from the foot of the stairs, where he was sitting on the handrail. There was a bow in his hand that hadn’t been there before, though. Hopefully it had come from one of the technicians and Barton hadn’t just helped himself to it.

That was another thing they’d have to work on before they sent him out in the field - the utter lack of _yes, sir_.

“This is Agent Sam Wilson, codename: Falcon. You’ll probably be working alongside him at some point. Sam, this is Clint Barton, our newest asset.”

He watched them shake hands, Sam offering to give Barton a tour and promising to show him where to find the good coffee while Barton was polite, didn’t crack any jokes and showed no trace of sarcasm. Interesting. Slightly suspicious, but interesting all the same. At least he was starting to come back to himself after the examination in Medical.

“Sam!” Sharon shouted. “Jacobsen wants to see how they handle at high speeds, can you come up and give him a demonstration?”

“Sure. You’re going to love this,” Sam stepped back until he was just far enough away from Phil and Barton to release the wings, which spread out several feet on each side of him.

They were definitely a lot better than the last ones, that much was obvious as soon as he took off: smoother, faster and stronger.

“Can I get one of those harnesses?”

Phil looked over his shoulder to where Barton was now sitting on the bottom step, his legs stretched out in front of him as he stared at Sam. God help the handler who was assigned to him. He’d never been so grateful that he no longer took on junior agents. “Don’t push your luck.”

He was about to lead Barton to the guest quarters when he saw something that made him stop and almost swear under his breath. Fury entered R&D, his jacket billowing behind him, Hill close behind.

“Agent Coulson, we need a moment of your time,” Fury said. He looked at Barton for a moment before deciding that he must have been the asset he’d approved hours ago. “We need to talk about Project Lazarus and the Initiative.”

“Agent Carter!” Phil called up and Sharon leaned over the handrail, Morse looking over her shoulder this time. She must have managed to get some time in R&D instead of the biological lab. “Can you show Barton to the guest quarters? He’s in room five.”

“Yes, sir.” Sharon started down the stairs and Phil looked over at Barton, who was still sitting on the bottom step, but was staring at Fury instead. Phil hoped that a pirate joke wasn’t on the way.

 

 

The ‘offer’ was a massive lie.

Clint realised that three days after he accepted it and was shown to his room—room because that was not a fucking apartment, no matter what the bored agent who showed him it told him. There was a single bed, a bathroom with no lock on the door and a small wardrobe. Everything was attached to the floor and the vents were screwed shut, not that it took him long to get them open, but that was not the point. The point was that SHIELD was supposed to be an alternative to prison, not a prison with a fancy name and some gadgets that he wasn’t allowed to see because his clearance apparently wasn’t high enough.

They wouldn’t even let him try hand to hand combat because of his leg, which was ridiculous. Clint had worked and ran with more painful wounds than a bullet wound that was more of a graze. He’d broken his wrists, had broken one of his legs and had pulled arrows from his own body; a little bullet wound was nothing.

Two days after being shown his room and five days after he accepted the offer, Clint started to get cabin fever.

Four days after being shown his room and one week after he accepted the offer, Clint disappeared.

 

 

_They were yelling again, but that was just like every other night. Clint rubbed his hand against his face. His cheek stung where his dad had punched him and his arm really hurt from when he’d been grabbed, but his mom had just stood there._

_“It’s going to be okay,” Barney whispered. He didn’t have as many bruises as Clint did because he wasn’t a_ worthless little shit _, but it had been a bad day. Their dad was angry because Clint had been hiding, but he’d only been hiding because he’d still been bleeding from the belt the night before._

_He’d got blood on the sheets, he’d been hiding in the attic and then he’d spilled juice at the dinner table. It was Clint’s own fault. Maybe if he wasn’t a_ worthless little shit _he wouldn’t get angry at him._

_When Clint was older, he and Barney were going to live somewhere with no blood on the sheets and no bruises on his arms._

_He told Barney and tried not to cry when Barney laughed._

 

 

Hill wasn’t known for her morning greetings, but she didn’t usually walk into Phil’s office at eight in the morning and stand in front of her desk with her arms folded like she was seriously contemplating dismissing or killing someone.

“Your asset is missing.”

“You could have knocked, and he isn’t my asset.” Barton wasn’t his responsibility. Phil had already signed him off to become Sitwell’s asset when he was ready to be put in the field, and after the preliminary tests had been done. He wasn’t Phil’s, and Phil didn’t particularly want him, not after spending so long tracking him. It wouldn’t be appropriate to become someone’s handler when he already knew so much about them. It would be like handing Fury an itemised list of every single thing that had happened since his own birth and then trying to look him in the eye afterwards.

Scratch that, Fury already knew most of the things that Phil could have lived without him knowing. He’d been involved in half of them.

“You brought him in and none of the other agents will willingly touch him with a ten foot barge pole. Do you know what he said during a briefing yesterday? A briefing he was supposed to be _observing_?”

Probably a smart-ass comment. “No.”

“He said, and I quote ‘weren’t there supposed to be four targets?’” When Phil didn’t answer, she leaned closer. “No one was supposed to know that there was a fourth target. The agents and assets who were going to kill the targets were only going to find out about the fourth one on the day. He has access to confidential information that has never left the offices of people with Level 6 clearance or higher. The day before, he was being examined when he asked how Sitwell’s leg was, but the only people who knew that Sitwell was injured were those who were in Medical when he was brought in.”

Phil pinched the bridge of his nose. He already knew exactly how Barton was getting confidential information. He hadn’t included it in the file because it hadn’t seemed very important at the time, not compared to the criminal histories of everyone Barton had known since he was a child.

“I’ll do something about it,” he said. “I just need a few minutes, and I’ll still be on time for the meeting.”

“Fix it and fast, because Fury’s still trying to decide if he wants his head on a plate. You’ll need to tell me how you manage to change his mind about things like this as well.”

Phil waited until Hill left before he picked up his phone and dialled one of the extensions.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do, as long as it gets me out of the lab,” Morse said before he could speak. “I can’t book any time in the gym or on the firing range because they’ve still got me listed as an in-house scientist.”

“You know that I can’t do anything about that.” It was one of the few things Phil disliked about his position since he’d been promoted. “I have a job for you. I need you to search the air vents.”

“...Has something escaped from the research labs again? That’s not my job, sir, especially not after the last time. That giant snake broke two of my ribs before we managed to kill it.”

Phil winced. He’d managed to forget the snake for almost six months, which was six months longer than the last time. On the bright side, there was now a compulsory training session on how to catch anything that escaped from the research lab. “No, it’s Barton, the man we brought in a few days ago?”

“Robin Hood?”

“That’s him. He’s been managing to get his hands on some confidential information, and Hill wants to know where it’s coming from.”

“And you think it’s coming from the vents?”

“I think that Barton’s overhearing things while hiding in the vents. It explains why no one can ever find him. I need you to find him and tell him to either stop listening in on confidential briefings or stop talking about them during the briefings he’s allowed to observe.”

There was a long pause, during which Phil was unsure if Morse was going to listen or laugh.

“Would you like me to tell him to stay out of the ventilation system, sir?” she asked, barely restrained laughter evident in her voice.

“No. Security’s been looking too relaxed recently. This should wake them up.”

 

 

Bobbi had done quite a few dirty jobs since she’d joined SHIELD. There had been a week when she’d spent most of her time searching through medical waste for traces of experiments being conducted by a doctor in New York (nothing had come of it) and a weekend that had consisted entirely of running samples against a mysterious fluid (which had turned out to be altered human DNA, much to everyone’s surprise).

She’d never been sent into the vents at one of SHIELD’S buildings, though.

_He better be in here or I’m going to start breaking into the range to practice in my own time._ She’d passed the range a few dozen piles of dust ago. Before that it had been Coulson’s office, a few rooms where meetings were usually held and a trip along the space above the quarters that belonged to the agents who lived on base.

After seeing the amount of dust there, Bobbi had never been so glad that she had an apartment off base. It was a shoebox, but she knew that it was clean and free of dust.

She was getting close to giving up and breaking into the range to hit some of the targets she’d seen agents miss – _field qualified_ agents, which was what hurt the most – when she saw someone crouching above a ventilation panel that led to the room below.

“Barton?” she asked. He didn’t jump, but he looked surprised when he saw her.

“Yeah?”

“Agent Coulson sent me looking for you. If you don’t stop eavesdropping on meetings, he at least wants you to stop running your mouth about the things you hear. You’re making people nervous, and nervous SHIELD agents shoot at things that make them nervous.” Of course, a lot of them had terrible aim, and being nervous wouldn’t help. With any luck, they’d only hurt themselves.

Barton shrugged. “Sure. Give me a minute, though.”

When she was sure that he was concentrating on whatever was going on below, Bobbi crawled closer. As soon as the vague murmuring became clear, she dropped onto her belly so that she could hear it even better.

“Fucking assets, man. Have you seen that new one they brought in? Bet he came right out the jail.”

“I heard they broke him out of a Chilean prison after he killed somebody over there.”

“Bullshit. There’s no way they went all the way to Chile for an asset. I heard they picked him up from a motel and told him that they’d kill him if he didn’t work for them.”

“Who cares?” someone cut in. Bobbi recognised the voice as belonging to one of the junior agents, a kid straight out of college who could barely handle a pipette without supervision. “He’s an asset; chances are he’ll be dead or let go in less than a year. The only reason SHIELD bothers with their sort is because they’re disposable and nobody gives a shit if they disappear.”

Bobbi wondered how easy it would be to pull some strings until he was stuck cleaning test tubes for a month.

“Is it true?” Barton asked. “Is SHIELD only interested in me because there’s no one out there who’s going to come looking for me?”

“No.” It wasn’t a lie—not totally a lie, anyway. One of the reasons Coulson had been authorised to bring Barton in had been his lack of connection to anyone who wasn’t a criminal they were keeping an eye on. He had a brother, and Bobbi wasn’t sure what the deal was with him, but he’d only been mentioned briefly in the report Coulson had submitted to Fury. Their brief meeting hadn't gone that well, at least for the brother. “Coulson would kill anyone who got you killed. He doesn’t make a habit of bringing people in alive.”

The last three people Coulson had been sent after had arrived at SHIELD in body bags. Their deaths had been clean, if not particularly kind.

“Huh. I thought he was some sort of babysitter for the new kids.”

Now _that_ was a nice image. Bobbi couldn’t remember the last time Coulson had done anything close to babysitting, unless the junior agents who’d been recruited at the same time as her counted. That had ended badly.

“He works with Fury a lot,” Bobbi shrugged. “If something important is going on, he and Hill are the ones who get the phone call. He’s a good agent.”

She let Barton mull that over while she sent Coulson a text to tell him that she’d found Barton and that she was going to lead him somewhere that they could stand up in. Preferably somewhere cleaner.

Seconds after she’d managed to wedge it back into her pocket, her phone buzzed against her hip, and Bobbi had to twist to reach it, scraping her knuckles on the floor of the—what was the place, anyway? She’d never seen any maps of the ventilation system, but she was sure that they weren’t supposed to be so big.

“Come on,” she said. “Coulson’s pulled some strings to get your hand to hand combat test moved to next week.” Easily lifting herself to her hands and knees, Bobbi managed to turn around in the tight space, aware of Barton’s eyes on her. “Stop staring at my ass. What are you doing up here, anyway?”

“I like being where people can’t find me.” The sound of his clothes brushing against the metal sides was the only way she could tell that he was following her, which was particularly unsettling because she knew that he was wearing combat boots. “No one ever looks up here.”

Yeah, somehow that wasn’t hard to believe. Once you got over the dust and general grime that was gathered in the corners and in some of the more isolated places, it wasn’t so bad. It could even be a nice place

 

 

“No hits that will leave long-term damage, keep the suits on at all times and dirty fighting is allowed and is not frowned upon. They need to see how you fight in a real situation, not a simulation.” Phil quickly checked on the bow he’d left beside the training mat. “Morse?”

Morse wandered out, still tying her hair back in a ponytail as she approached the mat, looking distinctly unimpressed. It was her default expression when it came to challenging other agents in hand to hand combat, usually because she had no problem taking them down.

“You’re the woman from the vents,” Barton grinned before Morse’s left fist caught his jaw. He staggered backwards, almost stepping off the mat before he caught himself and lunged at her.

All things considered, Barton wasn’t terrible when he had to fight in close quarters. His instincts were good, but they’d been honed the wrong way, shaped by abuse instead of training. He could dodge the blows Morse aimed at his face and upper body, but any attack that targeted his arms or legs, or involved a feint, caught him off guard.

Phil logged every single hit each of them made. Morse was leading when it they started the second bout, but Barton was doing better than Phil had expected, especially with the injured leg.

“Weapons out,” he called, and Morse withdrew her battle staves from the thigh holsters. Barton grabbed his bow from where it had been left beside the mat, using it to block her first attempt. Impressive, but it put too much weight on his injured leg and Morse easily pushed him to the ground, straddled his chest and pushed the staves against his throat.

Barton stared up at her, a weak smile spreading across his face. Morse didn’t move, the staves still pressed to his neck.

“You’re good,” he said before squirming until he could turn just enough for Coulson to get a good look at him. Morse hadn’t stayed away from his face as much as she should have, but there was nothing there that looked like it would leave permanent damage, so he wasn’t too worried. “She’s good. Is she going to be training me?”

“I wouldn’t make her suffer through that.” Morse rolled her eyes and tucked her battle staves into the high holders before getting to her feet and walking away. He’d known that the test wouldn’t take very long, but Phil had booked the room for two hours, more than enough time to let her get some training in without having to justify why a biologist needed to use the training area to the agent in charge of field training.

“Is she one of the best?”

“She isn’t classed as a field agent.” Not that Phil hadn’t spent hours trying to get her status changed. “You need a lot more training in hand to hand combat before we send you into anything too complicated. You would have done better if you’d let your leg heal before we tested you.” He still wouldn’t have won, but his specialty was long-range weaponry, which usually indicated a deficiency when it came to combat in close quarters.

If he put Barton right into field, it wouldn’t be the first time they’d lost an asset or an agent because they couldn’t win a fight against a hired goon.

Phil blocked out some hours on Barton’s almost empty schedule. “You’re going to be attending training sessions with junior agents three times a week. This should get your technique up to standard before we send you out in the field.”

“SHIELD wants me to be a sniper, right, so why do I need to be able to fight someone? If I make the shot when I should, they won’t get a chance to get close.”

“Snipers miss.”

“I never miss.”

“Until you do. Your field test is four weeks today. Don’t be late and don’t come unprepared.”

 

 

“Hey, birdie,” Clint said as he dropped down into the seat opposite Morse, his field test certificate tucked into his pocket. She looked up at him. “You didn’t tell me your name, and the codename on the training log was Mockingbird. Cute. You’ve hunted me through the vents, kicked my ass half a dozen times in the past month and I still don’t know your name.”

“Bobbi. Are you here for a reason or do you just like watching me? Because you did enough of that when you were supposed to be defending yourself.”

“I can’t help it if you’re beautiful.” It was an awful line, and she just rolled her eyes before going back to her food.

Hey, the last person he’d flirted with had abandoned him and put SHIELD on his trail. Maybe being bad at flirting with her was a good thing.

“They talk about him a lot,” Clint said, poking at the meat thing on his plate. What the hell was it supposed to be? It looked like meat, but it was spongy. He’d eaten a lot of weird stuff – travelling around the country, moving every few weeks hadn’t given him the best diet growing up – but he’d never had spongy meat.

“What is it this time? How many men he killed with a credit card or how many agents he’s supposed to be sleeping with right now?”

“They talk about that?” Clint had kind of assumed that Coulson was one of those people who had someone waiting for him at home, a wife who worried when he went out to fight aliens or whatever he did when he disappeared for a few days.

“Dating? You bet. It’s better than them talking about their work. The food’s good, even if it looks a bit weird.” As if to prove it, Bobbi took a bite of her own spongy meat thing. “They think that willingly spending time with someone means that you’re sleeping with them. It’s confusing for everyone else, because it just means that we work well together and don’t want to kill each other by the time the op’s over.”

Clint tried to remember the last time he’d liked someone and hadn’t slept with them. It had been a depressingly long time ago. In fact, he was sure that it had been before he’d hit puberty. Not that he'd particularly liked some of the people he'd slept with. Everything had seemed to come with a price and, for a long time, sex had just been one more thing that he’d traded for affection.

He looked up at Bobbi just in time to see her stab a carrot like it had offended her. She glared down at her plate as she ate and any agents who entered the room gave their table a wide berth.

“What’s wrong?”

She shoved her phone across the table. “Read that.”

 

_Agent Barbara Morse (codename: Mockingbird),_

_You application to take the field test has been denied._

_Agent Franklin Colton_

_AIC field training_

 

Clint had met Colton once; he’d seemed like a dick.

“How can they turn you down?” he asked. “You’re as good as me, maybe even better. When I took my test, you went easy on me.”

She stabbed another carrot. “Hannigan, the head of my department, won't let me go. Whenever it comes up, he tells me that I'm the best they have, and I can't take the field test without his permission. I could be the best agent SHIELD has and he’d still want me to stay in the lab.”

“Can’t Coulson do something? I mean, if he spends so much time with Fury, can’t he pull some strings?”

“He’d never do that. He can’t challenge Hannigan directly, but he can lobby for me to be allowed in the field part-time, which doesn’t require the field test. But….” She shrugged. “I guess I’ll just have to content myself with correcting the field qualified agents whenever they can’t hit a target or take down their friend in a fight.”

“You mean pointing out that they couldn’t hit the target if ‘they were aiming at the wide side of a barn while Fury held their hand’?”

“Not my favourite one.” She’d stopped stabbing at her food and given up on her coffee—Clint couldn’t blame her; it was sludge at the best of times, and it wasn’t a good day. “It’s why they called me Mockingbird when I started getting more involved in ops. I used to make fun of anyone who pissed me off.”

“Did you ever make fun of _me_?” He'd heard that she'd been working with the team that had tracked him down a few times.

“There was one time I called you a performing monkey with a quiver, but that was after your brother tried to grab my ass. I hadn’t met you yet.”

Clint winced, “Sorry. He…He wasn’t always like that, you know. He took care of me when we were kids.”

She raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t say anything about Barney, which was a relief because Clint didn’t feel like arguing about his brother. Talking about his brother would lead to talking about the circus, which would lead to talking about the Swordsman and Trick Shot, which would lead to all sorts of things he didn’t want to talk about.

“How was your first month with SHIELD? Make any friends, or did you just make enemies?”

“Sitwell isn’t too bad.” He’d read Clint’s file and hadn’t made any jabs at his brother or at his background. Matthews wasn’t bad—for a doctor, which meant that he still didn’t make the very short list of people Clint considered friends. Other than the first time they’d met, he’d only seen Sharon Carter a handful of times, but she and Sam (who’d offered Clint the kitchen in his private quarters) had never acted like Clint was an idiot because he didn’t have a high school education. Hell, Sharon had gone as far as to corner a junior agent who’d been mouthing off about him and had, very politely, but very firmly, told him that he’d never make it in SHIELD if he didn’t learn how to respect people whose skills outmatched his own. “I like Sharon and Sam. I haven’t really seen Coulson since the first field test.”

Other than a glimpse of Coulson working with Hill on something, and a quick warning to stay away from the experimental medicine section, Clint hadn’t seen him at all. Not that he was going to tell Bobbi that. He was pretty sure that it was rude to never try and talk to the person who had recruited him, but what was he supposed to say?

_Hey, you seem nice and you haven’t tried to make me pay for you saving my life, do you want to go for coffee?_

“He isn’t around that much,” Bobbi leaned over and stole some of the spongy meat that Clint had decided not to eat. It didn’t matter how good it tasted; it wasn’t supposed to be _spongy_ , and Clint could afford to be picky now. “I think Fury’s got him working on setting up some experimental programmes and a search for something. I’m not sure what they’re looking for or where it is, but there were parkas involved and one of the agents got stuck in a snow drift. Now, how about we go out and celebrate you passing your field test without one of the agents training you killing you?”

Huh. Clint could hear the implications behind that invite and, well, it was a nice invitation. Bobbi was beautiful, he liked being around her and she hadn't tried to kill him or sell him out yet, which already put her at least one above the last woman he'd dated and far above any of  the men he'd dated.

 

 

Sometimes Clint wondered why he made such bad decisions. Usually after drinking a lot and waking up to sunlight streaming in through the curtains, right across his face—wait a minute. His quarters didn’t have a window that let any light in before noon, sometimes later.

_Shots lined up on the bar._

_Empty shot glasses littering the bar._

_Sam and Sharon doing shots further down the bar, Sharon trying to match Sam shot for shot. Bobbi daring him to do the same, a glass in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other._

_Going back to her quarters instead of his own and watching her undress, letting her push him back onto the bed and straddle him, her long hair brushing his bare chest as she leaned down…_

“Don’t say it,” Bobbi said as she sat up, squinting in the sunlight as she fumbled for her glasses. Clint groaned and threw one arm across his eyes. “If you ask for morning sex, they’re going to find your body in the vents. It's going to look like suicide.”

“Wasn’t going to.” He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow. The sex had been good, but he was pretty sure he’d be in deep shit if anyone found out what had happened. It wasn’t professional to sleep with people you worked with; there had to be some sort of rules about it. Big rules. Right up there with no killing your co-workers and keeping your earpiece in during ops.

Oh, God, Coulson was going to kill him if he found out. That was if Fury didn’t find out first.

“How dead are we?” he asked into the pillow. “On a scale from getting a coffin to being buried in a matchbox?” 

_Please don't say matchbox._

A floorboard creaked beside the bed and the mattress shifted. Clint peeled his face away from the pillow to watch Bobbi sorting out the discarded clothes, still naked, so he pointedly avoided looking anywhere but at her face.

“SHIELD doesn’t care who you sleep with, as long as they’re not trying to infiltrate SHIELD or killing other agents. It’s in the handbook.” She gestured towards the packed bookcase in the corner. Clint tried not to stare at the panties she was waving as a result.

_There’s a handbook?_ “I don’t think I read the handbook. Hey, does this mean we can do this again?”

In response, Bobbi threw his clothes at him. “Pants on and get out. I have to be at a meeting in half an hour and I’m not going without showering.” She sniffed. “You should shower too. We both smell like we went for a swim in our drinks.”

“Maybe we can shower together?”

One of his boots almost hit him in the face. “Out!”

“Okay, okay.” Clint scrambled off the bed, pulling his boxer briefs on and trying to untangle his pants from his t-shirt. He was halfway through rooting through Bobbi’s clothes, trying to find his missing sock, when she walked out of the bathroom, dressed in a bathrobe. He froze; her shirt in one hand, his own t-shirt draped over his shoulder and one sock in the other hand. “You’re not going to kick me out when I’m wearing pants and no socks, are you?”

“Of course not. Look, I just wanted to say that, if you want to do this again, no strings attached… I’m open to it.”

“Really?”

“Fury trusts you, Coulson trusts you, you’re not that bad in a fight any more, and you can hold your liquor. You’re not the worst person I could sleep with,” she said with a smile.

“I feel honoured,” Clint deadpanned, but he was already wondering when he’d get the chance to see her again. Sure, he didn’t want anything long term and every relationship he’d had had ended badly, but Bobbi was a good person, and she could beat him in a fight.

Wow, he really had to get his thing for dangerous women under control.

 

 

Barton was trouble. Phil confirmed that when he got a call from one of the handlers telling him that ten junior agents were currently having nervous breakdowns on the firing range because Barton had made every single shot without breaking a sweat, while they had struggled to make three. It only got worse when agents from Security started calling him every week to complain that Barton was a security risk. There were other things -- a strange refusal to spend a prolonged period of time without another agent who'd spent several years with a circus, a fist fight in the cafeteria and several arguments with trainers.

After the second month and eighth official complaint (twenty-first unofficial one), Phil had started answering the phone with, “What’s he done now?”

Those calls usually spun off to arguments about whether an order had been disobeyed for the right reasons (quite often) or because Barton was an asshole who hated his handler and existed solely to make their life a living hell (more often than Phil would have preferred) but there was nothing life threatening. Barton was insubordinate at the best of times and just seemed to be pushing his luck at the worst times.

He didn’t expect to pick up the phone a month later to be told that Barton had been reported as lost in the field.

 

 

Sometimes Phil hated his job. Those were usually the times he had to work with Agent Simmons in any capacity. How Simmons had made it through the initial training, let alone managed to get into a position that allowed him to evaluate agents or assets in the field, he had no idea, but Phil hoped that he was benched soon, preferably before he got someone killed--or worse.

“Simmons, why have I just had a call about you requesting the paperwork necessary to write an asset off as lost? You’re supposed to be assessing Barton’s capabilities in the field: you shouldn’t be letting him out of your sight long enough to lose him.”

“We had to call off the op hours ago and he didn’t turn up at the extraction point,” Simmons said, already beginning to pack up his gear. He’d already removed his earpiece, his bulletproof vest and his gun had been left several feet away, half covered by paperwork to write an asset off as lost. From the look of it, he’d already started filling it in.

“You just left him out there?” It was getting hotter by the minute, and the last forecast he’d heard had estimated that it would reach one-ten soon. If Barton was still out there...

Barton’s words months before came back to him. _I want to help people._ It hadn’t been a lie; Phil had heard enough lies about why people wanted to join SHIELD -- _I want to challenge myself, I’d love to work for a covert organisation, it sounds fun_ \-- to be able to see right through them. Barton wanted to help people, and the op being called off wouldn’t have stopped him. He wasn’t lost at all, Simmons was just too incompetent to realise it.

Clint would have left with only a few bottles of water on him and, without the supply that should have been dropped off soon after he’d taken up his position on the rooftop, it didn’t look good for him. Dehydration at best, severe heatstroke at worst--and that was if Barton had managed to stay hidden.

Phil started pulling bottles of water from the cooler. If he remembered it correctly, Barton was supposed to be taking down a man who had been attempting to blackmail some of the country’s best scientists into creating a formula which slowed or stopped the physical aging process and, from what they knew of the man’s criminal activities, they had a good idea of what it would be used for. It wasn’t pleasant, and it wasn’t something that Barton would let go of easily. “He’s not dropped off the radar.”

“Sir, it’s his first assignment - no one goes missing on their first assignment unless they’re not planning on coming back!”

“Barton is not missing he’s right where you left him.” SHIELD was the last of a very short line list of choices for Barton. No one threw that sort of thing away, especially not someone like Barton. As difficult as he was, everything Phil knew about him suggested that he desperately wanted to belong somewhere where he wouldn’t be screwed over at every turn. “Go through with the rest of the extraction as planned, but send a Quinjet back as soon as you arrive at the second check-in.”

Simmons just stared.

“Are you waiting for him to write it down?” Hill snapped across the comm. “Hurry up and get back here before I write you up for abandoning an asset in the field!”

When Simmons was gone, Phil waited for Hill to speak again, loading the bottles into one of the cool bags instead of taking one of the smaller coolers. They weren’t as effective, but giving someone who had been in direct sunlight for hours on end something that was ice cold could do more harm than good.

“You better bring him back,” she said, “because if you don’t, Fury’s going to have both our heads on a plate, as well as Simmons’.”

“Leave Fury to me.”

 

 

The street was deserted, every car covered in a thin layer of dirt. It was too hot for most people to willingly go out in it. Clint licked his lips, watching the door his target was supposed to come out of in the next few minutes.

He hadn’t moved for hours, and he was beginning to feel it; his legs ached and kept cramping, his head throbbed from him being in the sun for so long with no cover, he could hardly see, his mouth and lips were painfully dry and he’d drank the last of the water hours ago.

No one had tried to contact him since Simmons had tried to call the op off, not even to ask why he hadn’t gone to the extraction point, but Clint wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t expected anyone to come.

No one ever came.

_Just a few more minutes,_ he thought, forcing himself to open his eyes again, squinting in the sunlight. He just had to make the shot, and then he could move, or maybe just go to sleep, because that sounded a lot better than trying to move.

The door opened. Clint took a deep breath and took the shot. He just saw blood splatter across the half-open door, vivid red against dull grey concrete, before he passed out.

 

 

“Barton.”

Someone was talking to him but it was too hot to listen to them. Most of the words didn’t even make sense: all he could make out was his name, and he wasn’t even sure that he was hearing it right. He could feel the burned skin across his shoulders and neck protesting when he tried to move. He just wanted to go to sleep.

“Barton, you need to wake up.”

“‘m awake,” Clint muttered, forcing his eyes open and closing them. It was too bright, too hot. He just wanted to go to sleep, but the man beside him wouldn’t let him, pressing a straw between his lips and telling him to drink, to go slow.

Not cold enough. Still too hot. He needed more, he needed it colder.

“Hill, I’ve got him. Have you got anyone from Medical with you?” A pause and then, “Good. If he’s been out here since he was dropped off, he’s going to need medical attention.” Another pause. “Severely dehydrated at best, but heatstroke is looking more likely by the minute.”

It felt like everything was on a delay. The words rushed past him, but they didn’t make sense for a few seconds. No, not the doctors. Doctors weren't good. They asked too many questions and said too much to the wrong people. Clint's stomach felt twisted and sore, but doctors were worse.

“No doctors. Please...”

"Barton, I need you to stay awake."

He knew that voice. A bullet and handcuffs that weren't too tight. Kind eyes. It had been too long since he'd seen someone with kind eyes. Coulson.

“Didn’t think anyone was coming for me.” The words caught in his throat, sticky and thick. It wasn’t the first time Coulson had come after him. Before they’d met, he’d probably followed him halfway around the world. That was nice. The last person who’d bothered to go after him had been the same person who had put SHIELD on his trail, so she didn’t count.

Coulson sighed, and his hand was cool and gentle against Clint’s sunburned shoulder. It took everything in Clint not to lean into the touch. "We don't leave people to die."

“That’s nice… It’s a nice lie.”

“It isn’t a lie.”

More water, cool but not cold enough. He wanted ice, something so cold that he could hold it in his hand until he couldn’t feel his fingers. Coulson’s hand was against resting against his jaw now, making sure that he didn’t choke. Clint could hear a few words from the earpiece when Coulson leaned down. He'd probably hardly been able to  hear him before; Clint would have remember to talk louder. Coulson had come after him. It was the least he could do.

_Agent Coulson, he have agents en-route, as well as some staff from Medical._

“You need a codename, sir.” Was that really his voice? It sounded like he’d been eating sandpaper for a month.

Coulson switched the bottle of water for one that was slightly cooler. “I had a codename.”

“Really? What was it?” He leaned heavily against Coulson, who was warm but didn't feel red hot like Clint felt. Thankfully, he didn't say anything or ask him to move. Clint didn't think he could move, even if he wanted to.

“I don’t think you’ll remember it when you wake up later on, which is the only reason I’m telling you. It was Cheese.”

“Cheese,” Clint repeated, listening to how rough and slurred the word was. “Need to remember that.”

 

 

“Your ‘World’s Greatest Marksman’ is turning out to be the Biggest Pain In My Ass,” Hill said when she moved the reports Phil had yet to get around to finishing off of the couch and threw herself down on it. She eyed the file on Captain America with the same irritated look she occasionally aimed at Fury. "Eight months, Phil. Eight months of him driving some of our best agents to despair."

Phil already knew what was annoying her; security continued to despair that they could keep criminals and evil geniuses out of SHIELD, but couldn’t keep an archer in, no matter what they did. Half of them were convinced that Barton was a mutant or had stolen some tech that allowed him to transport himself anywhere. He was tempted to tell them to check the ceilings and ventilation system, but that would make it too easy for them.

“I have my own assignments and he’s a perfectly good asset. He passed every test you gave him. His firearms score was through the roof and his work with a bow is even better. Once he brushes up on some better hand to hand techniques, you’ll be able to put him anywhere.” And he’d come readymade. Even if Hill didn’t like Barton, she’d be able to appreciate having an asset arrive with the right skills for the job. "He's a good asset and he works perfectly well in the field. I don't handle junior agents, and an asset with less than two years with the agency is classed as a junior agent. Even if I did, I have operations to arrange, as well as Project Lazarus to supervise."

“Transfer them. Do them in your spare time. According to you, Barton could be SHIELD’s greatest asset, not someone who’s been dead for longer than we’ve been alive. According to the handlers who’ve had him so far, he’s perfect when you have him shooting something, but it’s when he’s not shooting something that he becomes a problem. He ignores orders, chooses his own positions, activates comms without being ordered to, refuses to use a gun, has a blatant disregard for his own safety and disappears as often as once a week. Leave the dead alone, Phil, and help us with the living.”

“If they’re inactive for too long, then they’re officially closed,” his fingers slipped over the front of the Captain America file. It had hardly left his desk since he’d got the clearance to access it, other than the times he’d allowed Sam and Sharon access to the hard copy. 

The Winter Soldier file was another one that should have, theoretically, been closed long ago, but Phil had always been fascinated by an assassin no one had ever been able to identify, who could infiltrate some of the most secure groups and buildings they had on record. He couldn’t let the Captain America file be closed, especially not when there was a woman who called every six months to ask if there was any news on him.

Of course, the files weren't the only thing she was talking about. She was talking about Portland, but the files were the easy part of that equation.

“Jones can take care of them.”

“He can’t handle the paperwork to request access to restricted files. He’s not getting anywhere near this.”

“Clements.”

“His passwords are regularly hacked by teenagers halfway around the world; there’s a reason he never does anything but type up reports from Medical.”

“Wilson.”

The automatic _no_ didn’t come. Sam was one of the best agents they had. Skilled, with common sense that was painfully rare among some of their most skilled agents. If anyone was going to be attached to the ongoing search for Captain America, Sam was Phil’s first choice, and possibly would have been his only choice if it weren't for Sharon. He’d been partially responsible for recruiting Wilson as well; social workers didn’t usually take too kindly to men in suits turning up at their workplace and making them offers.

Sharon Carter would be a good person to have on the search, and she worked well with Wilson. They’d both read the Captain America file enough times that they knew the basics, if not everything, but it wouldn’t take them long to catch up. It would only require allowing them to access the file permanently, rather than when Phil himself was too busy to work on it full-time.

He quickly typed up emails to Sam and Sharon, changing the security to allow them access on the computerized files for both the Captain and the Winter Soldier. He handed Hill the rest of the files on the junior agents he was supposed to be evaluating with a nod, before he went to find Barton.

 

 

Clint was hiding out in the gym’s ceiling when someone walked in. He scooted back in the small space and peered down through the gap he left so that he could watch the other agents train. No one was on the roster for anything after eight PM and, while some agents and assets didn’t go by the times they were pencilled in for, it was almost one in the morning.

Most people were asleep or out on assignments. The ones who had places off base had left hours ago.

“Barton,” Coulson said, spreading what looked an awful lot like paperwork over one of the benches on the other side of the room, “if you don’t come down, Higgins will be sending you on a two-week long surveillance operation.”

Fuck. Surveillance operations were the worst. Too much sitting around, absolutely no talking allowed and not enough action. Half the time he didn’t even get to shoot someone at the end of it or, if he did, he was ordered to use a gun.

He pushed one of the ceiling tiles aside, dropped down a line and slid down it. His boots hardly made a sound when he hit the floor. Good. It looked like he’d be keeping the boots, even if he decided he wasn’t sticking around and working for SHIELD. The training had been nice, Bobbi, Sam and Sharon were good people, but most of the other people he’d worked with had treated him like an idiot after they’d read his file.

“How’d you find me?”

“You’re not that hard to find if you know where to look.” Coulson gestured towards the paperwork.

The font was cramped, but it looked a lot like the shit Clint had signed when he was recruited. His leg twinged just thinking about it—it wasn’t his first scar, but it was the first one that had anything remotely pleasant attached to it.

ASSET TRANSFER was across the top, followed by a bunch of stuff that made it sound like they were sending a package halfway across the country. It wasn’t until he reached his name that Clint’s stomach gave that uncomfortable jolt again (and it definitely wasn’t the good jolt he’d felt when he first met Coulson) because _they were getting rid of him_.

“Was it because Security couldn’t find me?” he asked quietly, because he had to know. That is his last chance and he managed to fuck it up. Maybe it was the origami rabbits in the breakroom. They were only supposed to be a joke, especially after he found out that Jones was scared of them. How was he supposed to know that a fear of real rabbits translated to paper folded to look a bit like them? No, it was probably the constant disappearing, because Trick Shot and Barney had hated him vanishing on them, and his dad used to yell whenever he couldn’t find him. Now they were probably going to send him to jail or something.

Sooner or later, they always got bored or realised that he didn’t have what they wanted or that he wouldn’t give them what he had.

Coulson, when Clint finally managed to make himself look away from ASSET TRANSFER, looked confused.

“Keep reading,” he said, and Clint did. He felt Coulson’s eyes on him, like he was trying to take him apart and see what made him tick.

_ASSET TRANSFER... transfer between handlers... responsibilities as handler... Agent Philip J. Coulson will assume all responsibilities for Clinton F. Barton._

_Oh_ , Clint thought and looked up. Coulson was still watching him, but he looked less like he was delivering bad news, less like a SHIELD agent and more like... Clint had no idea what it was, but it was something nice and it made him want to back away slowly and move closer at the same time.

“You’re not getting rid of me?”

Coulson shook his head. “No. Why would we get rid of you?”

_Because all I’ve ever been is trouble. Because there’s only so much shit people will take, even if I can make shots most people can’t even dream of. Because everyone leaves eventually._

“Hey, that means I’m your problem now.” Clint looked up towards the ceiling. “Does this mean you’re going to tell Security where I am when they can’t find me?”

It wasn’t quite a smile – more of a lip-twitch thing – but it was the closest thing to a smile that Clint had received from him since he’d been stupid enough to accept that damn ‘offer.’

“No. It keeps them on their toes. That doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want; this is your last chance, don’t throw it away.”  
  
“Will you tell me why your codename was Cheese?” Clint asked as Coulson started to walk away.

 

 

**Year Two**

Sometimes Clint thought that the agents were lying when they said that they kept an eye on scientists that looked like they could step from ‘genius’ to ‘evil genius’ soon--how the hell did they manage to miss that they’d formed a group and were experimenting on people? Probably the same way they’d missed that they’d built something that looked like the bastard child of a Quinjet and the Helicarrier, the same thing that was hovering above the building.

If he took that out, it would fall right into the building, and the building hadn’t been in great shape before the evil geniuses had moved in.

“Falcon, how close are you?” Clint asked, already working out the shot. He could make it easily, but the problem was that the shot was impossible to make from the roof, and the floors below were full of rampaging human-beast hybrids. He was sure he’d heard one say that he/it had wanted to eat one of the scientists before it had been shot earlier.

“Look up,” Sam said and, oh, that was perfect. Clint smiled, already preparing an exploding arrowhead. He could  just hear Sharon shouting orders over the comms, her and Coulson passing updates back and forth. As background music went, it wasn't bad. “Oh, no, you don’t. Don’t you pull that trick.”

Clint shrugged, knowing that Sam would catch the movement, and started to run.

"Clint!" Sam yelled.

The roof wasn’t big, but it was enough to give him a decent build-up before he jumped, turned and shot an arrow directly into the underbelly of what he thought of as the Evil Bastard.

_Five_.

He was falling.

_Four_.

Shit, Sam wasn’t going to be able to catch him, not before the explosive arrowhead detonated.

_Three_

The arrowhead exploded just as Sam grabbed him, clipping a second line on to the back of Clint’s vest, shouting something that was lost in the blast (it probably included a lot of curses and insults). Clint laughed, trying to ignore the fear that still had his lungs in an iron grip of  _oh, God, I almost died, I almost died, Ialmostdied_.

 

 

Sam dropped Clint unceremoniously to the ground. Clint wasn’t sure if he was trying not to burst out laughing or trying not to cry, rolling over onto his back, gasping for breath because he was still alive, because (just for a few seconds) he’d thought he was going to die.

“If you ever do that again,” Sam said as he landed beside Sharon, the wings folding up against his back, “I’m going to throw you through the window of Fury’s office and leave you to explain yourself.”

“Coulson wouldn’t let you,” Clint shot back. There was a nasty cut on his arm, and a few pieces of glass, but it wasn’t much considering that he’d just taken down the Evil Bastard and an entire building with one exploding arrow, after throwing himself off the same building. It was definitely going in the ‘win’ folder. Or maybe his disciplinary folder. He had enough complaints and notes that it had its own file now.

“Of course I’ll let him.” Coulson was standing in the doorway, his earpiece in one hand and his gun in the other. He had a knife stuck between his belt and pants, and blood on his hands. “I’ll take you to Fury personally unless you can come up with a very good reason for throwing yourself off a building when you’re surrounded by science experiments gone wrong.”

Clint grimaced. “It was the only way to make the shot, sir.”

“Somehow I doubt that.” That was definitely blood on his hands, and Clint was sure that he hadn’t been carrying the knife when they’d left HQ. What else had he picked up out there?

“It’s true,” Sharon said, and Clint decided that he'd kiss her if he wasn't afraid of being kicked in the balls. Especially because she was standing with her heel pushed into the lower back of one of the scientists. He was groaning something against the ground: Clint could only catch every second or third word but she pressed harder whenever the word ‘bitch’ came up. The scientist squeaked. Sharon ignored him. “If he hadn’t taken the shot, we would have been overwhelmed before our back-up got here.”

Coulson nodded and put his earpiece back in. He held out one hand to Clint, and it look a second for him to realise that Coulson was offering to help him up. Clint grabbed his hand and scrambled to his feet, wincing at the pain in his back and shoulders. Okay, jumping of the building had been a terrible idea, if only because Sam’s harness hadn’t originally been built for two and it hurt like a bastard to be clipped to it. He wondered when the new one R&D was working on with some sort of secret consultant would be ready, and if it would be better for saving someone's ass in a tight spot.

“Sure, you believe her.” Ouch, he’d definitely feel that in the morning. He could already feel the bruises from where his own clothes had pulled tight after he’d been clipped on. Maybe he’d try and talk to R&D about something a little less yanky, and some arrowheads that would be useful the next time he had to jump off a building.

“She doesn’t throw herself off buildings.”

Clint wiped the blood from his arm on Coulson’s sleeve. He didn’t even blink.

“Can I talk to R&D about arrowheads with grappling hooks in them?”

“I’ll take you to them personally--as soon as Medical is done with you,” he added and Clint made a face. It could have been worse. Coulson could have said that he was going to send him to Fury to explain why he’d jumped off a building, or he could have said he was going to send him to another handler. Or jail. Jail was looking pretty likely the longer he worked for SHIELD. It wasn't like they could just throw him out on the street when he knew SHIELD's secrets--he could tell anyone anything.

 

 

Coulson wasn't like the other handlers, wasn't like anyone Clint had ever met, really. He wasn’t stupid like Simmons, who had been told to assess his field capabilities and had assumed that Clint had decided that he didn’t want to work for SHIELD, and had fucking abandoned him in the middle of a heat wave. He wasn't as warm as Clint's second handler (who had turned out to be depressed and desperate for all the kinds of relationship that were alien to Clint), but he wasn't cold like his first handler (who had finally lost his patience with Clint when he'd refused to kill a kid).

"It was a kid," Clint said, because he knew damn well that the bastard had only put down 'insubordination' in his file. "There was a kid there and, if I'd taken the shot, I would have killed him."

“I know.” Phil held up a form, something about surveillance and a correction needing to be make in an official recording of an incident--why did SHIELD have so many forms? Clint _hated_ paperwork. “I checked the surveillance footage and not taking the shot was the only way to avoid killing him. Hannigan should never have recorded the operation as a failure on your part.”

“Why do you even listen to me?”

“You’re the one with the skills and experience; there’s no point in me telling you to do something that’s impractical or dangerous for you or any civillians in the area. In some situation, I believe you know better than me what needs to be done, and I'm going to let you do it--even if it means letting you avoid Medical. But,” Phil added, holding up a first aid kit that Clint could have recognised from the other end of one of SHIELD's insanely long halls, "that doesn't mean I'm letting you get away with jumping off buildings or go with any medical treatment."

 

 

“I heard some agents talking earlier; they think your nickname is Iceman, but they wouldn’t say where they found it out. Come on, you need to explain why your code name was Cheese and not Iceman.. Iceman fits so much better. How’d you get landed with Cheese?”

Barton wasn’t lurking in the ceiling today—he called it scouting and occasionally claimed to be training Morse in more secretive ways of infiltrating buildings, but it was lurking to any sane person who wasn’t used to people using the ceiling space to get around. He was lying on the couch under Phil’s office window, shooting paperclips at the ceiling with a makeshift bow. He called out where the next one was going to end up: he never missed. Not that Phil needed an impromptu demonstration to prove that; he had a list of ops that had only been successful because Barton was one of the best, possibly even  _the_ best. 

“Was it a dare? Or is that your favourite food or something? There was a guy at the circus, an acrobat, he’d only say his name was Salami and I don’t think I ever saw him eat any other kind of meat. Hey, does Fury know where it came from?”

“I’ve known Nick Fury since before he was Nick Fury, so I assume so,” Phil allowed. He wasn’t going to tell Barton that Nick had been one of the people who had given him the nickname after a week on leave in Philidelphia, and eight hundred dollars being spent on something very unfortunate. Hopefully it would keep Barton quiet long enough for him to finish the transfer paperwork. Threatening to change his mind and send Barton to someone else, someone who was supposed to be handling assets would work, but after Barton’s reaction when he’d thought he was being dismissed by SHIELD as a whole? It would be unfair at best and downright cruel at worst. Outright cruelty was something Phil had always struggled with: it was the reason his sister had once sent him a birthday card that proclaimed him to be _the nicest man who could kill you with a paperclip_.

Sometimes Phil wished that they'd never ran into each other on that op.

Barton wrinkled his nose and shot another paperclip at the ceiling. It landed between two others: there was barely enough room for it. For anyone else, it would have been an impossible shot.

“How does that work?” He switched to staples. “I didn’t think there was a _before SHIELD_.”

“It works.”

A few moments of merciful silence and then--

“Did you really kill someone with a staple?”

“Did you ask as many questions when you were a child?”

The staple landed between two paperclips, but Phil saw Barton swallow, dropping the makeshift bow for a moment before he recovered.

“Not really,” he said. “I learned to shut up pretty quick after the first couple of punches.”

Phil wondered if his sister would ask questions if he put that birthday card through the shredder. Of course Barton hadn’t been the sort to ask too many questions as a kid: what time he hadn’t spent in an abusive household had either been spent in a crowded orphanage or in a circus, surrounded by adults who most likely hadn’t taken much notice of him unless they’d been able to use him in some way. No, they definitely hadn’t taken much notice of him unless they were getting something out of it. Phil knew that much from the research he’d done on Barton.

He let five minutes pass. Five more minutes of Barton firing staples into the ceiling -- staples which Phil would have to remove or risk them falling down on someone’s head in the middle of a meeting -- and five minutes of Barton being completely silent. It wasn’t as nice as he’d thought it would be.

“It was Hill who killed a man with a staple.” It had been a larger than normal staple, but she’d made a very neat job of cutting through the carotid artery with it. “I had a paperclip. We were in a stationary store and some mercenaries decided to take their chances.”

Phil didn’t tell Barton to stop talking when he started again, asking about the kind of staples and paperclips, why had they had to kill them, why had they been targeted in the first place and, most importantly, Clint said, was it the strangest thing he’d ever used to kill someone?

 

 

_The only person still working at the orphanage where the Barton brothers had been sent after their parents had died was a sixty year old woman who had been a recent hire back then. She introduced herself as Alice._

_"I've worked here for years," she said. "They were good kids, probably would have had pretty good lives if they'd been born into a different family. Good boys, both of them, a little rowdy, but nothing that they wouldn’t have grown out of. Bright as well. The younger one, Clinton, he was always getting into trouble with the older boys. He couldn’t leave well enough alone. His brother tried to stop him, of course, but Charles usually found better thing to do. By the time they left, I think he was running out of time for his little brother.”_

_“Why did no one ever report them missing?” There was no excuse for that—and Phil hoped that he reason wasn’t that no one had even noticed that they were gone, because that was something he always dreaded finding whenever he had to track someone down; that no one had cared enough to notice that they were gone._

_“With all due respect, Agent, look around you. We have over sixty children here, and we used to have more. There’s not enough time to take care of the ones who want to stay. I went out every night for a week to look for those boys, but there were people here who needed me.”_

_She held out a small box of photographs. Most of them were of two young boys, the oldest maybe ten at the most, but a couple of them were of them with their parents. Their smiles were forced, their eyes sad and, in more than a few of the photos, they had visible bruises. Phil swallowed the lump in his throat._

_“These are the only things I could find. I’m afraid that what little else there was had been passed on to other children over the years, or was thrown out."_

_Phil carefully secured the photos to the scant notes he already had, making sure that they wouldn't be crushed in the briefcase and tucked the notebook in one of the compartments._

_"There were... rumours," Alice said. "Some people said that the boys joined a circus that was passing through at the time, but I... I always thought that someone passing through had taken one of them and the other had just left because there was nothing holding him back."_

_Charles Barton, Phil suspected, would have been the one to leave if his younger brother wasn't there. What little he knew about him didn't point to anything overly positive._

_"Can you do an old woman a favour? If you find those boys -- men, they'll be grown men by now, won't they? If you find them, can you tell me if they're okay? I always used to try to keep an eye on the children after they were old enough to leave, but..." She gestured to a group playing baseball outside. "There are far too many for me to help nowadays."_

_In that moment she looked older than her sixty years._

_"I'll see what I can do," Phil promised her, already making plans to pull Morse from the lab (ignoring Hannigan's complaints) and ask her to find out which circus had been passing through when the Barton brothers had left the orphanage._


	3. Chapter 3

**iii. _So you get a kidney punch, a little blood in your urine. It isn’t over yet, it’s just begun._**

****

_He couldn’t stop shaking._ You’re not a kid anymore, so stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about _and he tried to smile at his reflection, but he just looked scared and sick and shaky. A kid, not a man. There was a bruise across the top of his arm, half-covered by the sleeve of his t-shirt, that looked like a handprint, another on his stomach that looked like a boot if he stared at it hard enough._

_He’d hit the target first time the next time, Clint swore. He’d show them that he wasn’t just a stupid little kid, that he could go up against Trick Shot if he had to. He’d lost the bet for the Swordsman, but he wouldn’t do it again. He’d win the next time._

_“Hurry up!” Barney shouted, because they were allowed the night off to go to the closest town, and Barney wanted to see if he could find the blonde girl who was flirting with him earlier. Clint didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to see anyone, or talk to anyone, but they’d try to say something if they saw him. They’d ask why he was being so quiet and where the bruises had come from (just like the teachers: Clint remembered how that had ended)._

_Clint brushed his teeth again and didn’t flinch when the Swordsman clapped him on the back as he passed him. It was an old routine: you got hit one night and you'd get hit again if you flinched the next night._

_Clint didn't go with Barney. He hid under one of the trailers (like when he’d been a kid and his dad had been after him for something), and waited until his brother stopped looking for him and left before he crept around the edge of the big tent and slipped in. No one gave him a second glance, too busy with their own preparations. He waited until he was sure they weren't watching, and began to climb._

_It had been a while since he'd climbed so high, at least since they’d been in the orphanage, and the blisters on his hands ached and throbbed, threatening to burst, but Clint made it to the top, kneeling on the small flat platform._

_He was high enough to see everything: the Swordsman talking to someone in the corner, the acrobats practicing below him, Trick Shot showing some curious kids around, but none of them ever looked up. Why would they? There was nothing of interest so high._

_Up high, Clint was invisible, untouchable. Up high, no one could reach him, but he could see them all._

 

 

**Year Three**

 

The rumour mill said that you couldn’t work so well together unless you’d fucked, but if Clint listened to the rumour mill, he’d believe that Nick Fury was a robot and that Coulson was the one who kept his programming up to date—or that Coulson was the robot and Fury had built him after his friend had been killed years ago.

So, Clint didn’t listen to the gossip, but Hill didn’t like anyone and she wasn’t polite to anyone. Sometimes she smiled at Coulson, the faint, exasperated smile of someone who knew exactly what happened in his life every day, and Clint ignored the strange spark of jealousy.

No one had ever known what happened every day of his life.

Bobbi was nice. She didn’t mind their little thing having no strings attached to it (although that had kind of disappeared the longer they spent with each other, and nothing had happened since the mess with the Phantom Rider), and she didn’t shy away from kicking his head in during training—and he returned the favour. The one time he’d gone easy on her, she’d realised halfway through and brought out her battle staves. He’d had bruises for weeks. The day she’d been approved to work in the field part-time, they’d celebrated by taking as much alcohol as they could carry to a hotel a few blocks from SHIED and leaving some ugly marks on their personnel files.

Sam and Sharon, while they didn’t work with Clint as often as Bobbi, were definitely the sort of people Clint liked spending time with. They were competent and didn’t take any shit from anyone. Sharon was usually willing to spar with him, and Sam never turned down an invitation to watch football on the huge TV Clint had splashed out on when he’d seen how much SHIELD was paying him. And Redwing was cool, not to mention useful in a tight spot. Clint had always liked birds of prey (it wasn’t something he shared very often; he heard enough bird jokes from junior agents who thought that he couldn’t hear them).

While Clint didn’t see Coulson as much as he would have liked, he was a good handler. He didn’t care what Clint did in his spare time (which he’d made sure Clint had known when Clint had accidentally answered Bobbi’s phone).

It was nice. He had friends, knew that he could get three meals a day and a roof over his head. He even got paid regularly. It was a lot more than he’d ever had before.

 

 

“We’ve got an op, and the orders came directly from Fury himself. Natalia Romanova,” Coulson said, opening the file and spreading the contents across the desk so that Clint could get a good look at it.

Clint already knew what he was going to see, who he was going to see. He’d known her as well as he’d known himself—or so he’d thought, right up until she’d left him in a hotel with a team of agents on his tail, and an empty bed. She didn’t look any different to how she had looked three years before, but looks could be deceiving, something Clint had learned the hard way a lot of times.

“Does he want me to bring her in?”

There were photographs of her as a child, but no mentions of any parents. Instead, something called the Red Room turned up in almost every paragraph, but what stood out were a few photographs of her standing in a room, brushing her fingers against the cryogenic storage containers on either side of the gap. It was like she was looking for something and, even without being able to see her face, Clint knew that he’d see a sadness there if he could have.

"They want her taken out of the equation. She's been getting involved with too many dangerous people."

_Like me_ , Clint thought and thumbed through photographs of bodies and badly taken ones of people in hospital beds. There was no pattern that Clint could see, other than the payments that followed the deaths or serious injuries. She wasn’t doing it for herself, then. There was no revenge, no anger, just the deceptive simplicity of the killing and then the payment—and she was smart about it, too. She got half of the money upfront before she did anything.

He was going to go in and kill someone he'd believed that he was in love with, even if it had only been for a few months.

_This is what happens when you get on the wrong side of SHIELD. They take you out or they turn you into one of them_.

 

 

_The hotel room was the most luxurious Clint had ever stayed in. He never wanted to leave; it didn’t just have a bath, it had a hot tub on the balcony, a gym and a swimming pool on the ground floor, even a firing range._

_“I love you,” he muttered against her shoulder, breathing in the smell of her shampoo and perfume. He'd been half in love with her since she'd walked up to him in a bar at New York, when he was trying to work out if security was lax enough for him to dine and dash at the restaurant next door. She was the most beautiful woman  he'd ever met, and she'd already given him more than anyone else had._

_Natasha pushed him away, her fingers lingering against his chest. “Love is a childish idea, for idealists and idiots.”_

_Clint had never been a child. He’d been someone’s object to own (Trick Shot, the Swordsman, both of them had taught him that the only way to get anything was to trade something, to trade yourself and, well, Clint had never thought that he was worth as much as they’d given him in return). He’d been an orphan (still was) and had been on the run, but he’d never been a child. He’d been an idealist though, just for a little while, until he’d learned better (maybe he still was, deep down, still hoping for things and people to be good)._

_Natasha stroked her fingers across his chest, his skin cool in the early morning breeze coming in through the open doors. “You will learn, Clint, that love has no place in our lives.”_

 

_He woke up alone and noticed a car following his, two cars behind, three hours later._

 

 

It wasn’t very difficult to find Natasha. That was what confused Clint. Even when they’d been working together, Natasha had only ever been found when she’d wanted to be found. She wasn’t the kind of person you could just wake up one morning and go searching for.

Case in point: after they’d found the warehouse, Clint spent almost an entire day on a rooftop opposite, rifle in hand, his fingers beginning to go numb from the cold. God, he hated the cold. He’d spent too many years living in apartments with no heat and wherever he could get some sleep to really believe Coulson’s promise, that they didn’t leave agents behind (that he’d always get home, somewhere warm and safe).

“Freezing my ass off up here,” he hissed. “If you keep me here much longer, I won’t be able to make the shot. Can’t shoot if I can’t feel my fingers.”

“You’ve managed to shoot in worse conditions.” Coulson’s voice was low, but Clint could hear him clearly over the comms. His was the only voice he’d heard for the last week, hiding out in a grotty apartment which, with its small bedroom with two single beds, aging kitchen and rickety stairs, was beginning to feel a bit too much like home. At least Coulson wasn’t messy and he didn’t snore. He did sleep with one hand under his pillow, though, and he definitely wasn't a morning person. The memory of waking him up on the second day by putting the strongest coffee Clint could find on one of the bedside cabinets and hoping it would work before he had to get any closer. Clint had been sent to kill people who hadn't snapped at him as much as Coulson had before he'd had his coffee.

“I still say this is a bad idea. I know her; she isn’t this easy to find if she doesn’t want to be found. I tried.” And Clint had. He'd searched for her for weeks before finally accepting that she didn't want anything to do with him and trying to disappear--which had been easier thought than done when SHIELD had been following him.

The silence that fell between them when Natasha rounded the corner at the other end of the block was thick with apprehension. Clint hunkered down, his finger hovering less than a centimetre from the trigger. She didn’t look around; there was no sign of the precautions she’d taken when they’d been working together, none of the wariness.

He was prepared to let that slide, until she walked up to the converted warehouse and just stood there, looking in her bag for something. Clint watched her for a few minutes, uncertainty growing in the pit of his stomach. It was way too easy. He’d even have a perfect headshot from where he was.

“It’s too easy,” Clint muttered, lowering the gun. Natasha stood there for several more minutes, making a show of checking what Clint was sure was every weapon she had on her. “Coulson, I’m not taking the shot. I’m going in.”

“Barton, if you have the shot, take it.”

“Not yet. I need to check something first. _Please_.” It was a dirty shot, but he didn’t have time to keep it clean. “You said you trust my opinion, sir.”

A pause and then a sigh. “What’s wrong?”

“She’s making it too easy. I think she wants to be taken down.” The idea had been sitting in the back of his head since Clint had seen the surveillance photographs. She’d looked tired. He knew the feeling too well. “Permission to enter the building and approach her?”

He could almost hear Coulson debating the pros and cons, but Clint was prepared. He knew what it was like to be tired of your own life, of the constant running and fear that soaked into every part of it; the way it settled deep in your bones until everything ached and it was too difficult to imagine living that life any longer. Live like that for too long and it became too much for even the best people. Black Widow was one of the best, but Clint wondered how Natasha felt about her life.

“Permission granted. And Hawkeye?”

“Yeah?”

“You have twenty minutes before we blow the building.”

 

 

There was no sign of life in the building, but Clint knew that there was nowhere else that Natasha could have gone. He’d searched the warehouse while Coulson had been rigging it with explosives earlier, had even hidden one of his bows and a quiver there just in case anything happened. Walking into Natasha’s territory with only a knife was too stupid an idea for Clint to even consider it.

"Three little angels, all dressed in white, tried to get to heaven on the end of a kite, but the kite string was broken, down they all fell, they couldn't get to heaven so they all went to... Two little angels, all dressed in white..." he sang as he walked along the corridor. _Come on, where are you? Come out, come out, wherever you are_.

Clint made it through angels, devils, goblins, ghosts, and was trying to remember if trolls had a section when he felt the gun against the back of his head.

"Found her," he said as Natasha slowly came into view, never moving the gun.

"One more line, and I _will_ kill you," she promised. “You can't sing with your throat cut or with a bullet in your head.”

“Well, it’s nice to see you haven’t changed.”

She ignored that. “I’m not surprised that they sent you to kill me.”

"What makes you think I didn't volunteer?" Carefully, very aware that any sudden movements would probably end with his brains splattered across the wall and a note in his file about how he’d died being an idiot, going up against the Black Widow, Clint held up both hands, showing her how unarmed he was. “Not gonna kill you if you put the knife down. I can’t try anything like this.”

“You have a knife in each boot, and I’m willing to bet that your bow is hidden somewhere in this room.” Her gaze swept across two of the walls before she walked over and opened one of the dresser drawers.

Okay, maybe he could have done a better job of hiding it, but he hadn’t exactly been given much time. As long as she didn’t find the quiver he’d be fine. There were enough of SHIELD’s fancy arrowheads for him to be able to take her down.

“You sent SHIELD after me.”

“It was for your own good.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was.” Clint crouched down, very slowly, and pulled the knife from his right boot. It was the one Bobbi had given him, part of her small collection. He laid it flat on the floor, far enough away that it would be obvious if he tried to reach for it. He pulled out his earpiece and crushed it under his foot. Natasha watched him, her eyes flicking between the remains of the earpiece and his knife. “That’s why I’m taking you in.”

“You know what SHIELD does to people like me,” she said, but she lowered the gun ever so slightly. Okay, he still had a chance of getting out without having to kill her, or having her kill him. Then again, Coulson would probably kill both of them; Natasha for being high on SHIELD’s threat list and Clint for taking his earpiece out during an active operation. “They have me classed as a Level 1 risk. People like me? We don’t get a second chance. They’ll kill me on sight.”

“Not if I vouch for you.” He hoped that it would count for something. Coulson would be pissed off when he turned up with her, but Coulson had also made sure that Clint hadn’t been kicked out of SHIELD since he’d joined, so it was a better option than taking Natasha to anyone else. They _would_ kill her on sight. He’d heard enough agents talking about the infamous Black Widow to know that it would be seen as a badge of honour to be the one to kill her. Coulson didn’t care about badges of honour; he hadn’t even told anyone that he’d been the one to bring Clint in. “My handler, one of the people who came after me, he’s fair; he’s good. He’ll do his best to make sure you get a chance, but that can’t happen unless you come with us. Come with me. Please.”

_I don’t want you to die. I really don’t want you to die_.

Natasha’s gaze was heavy on him for almost a minute before she lowered the gun. Clint breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God. That could have got _really_ messy.

“I led SHIELD right to you. Why would you do this for me?”

“SHIELD gave me a second chance. I know that wasn’t what you were going for, but that’s what happened. I owe you a second chance.”

 

 

Clint was fully prepared for some sort of stand-off when he entered the safe house, but he wasn’t expecting to walk in and immediately have a gun pointed at his head. He stared down the barrel for a second before raising an eyebrow at Coulson.

“She isn’t going to do anything,” he said. She hadn’t tried anything during the walk to the safe house, and Clint had even let her keep her gun as a sign of trust.

Natasha, to her credit, didn’t try anything now. She just looked him up and down, probably noticing hidden weapons that he was carrying, and looked him in the eye.

Natasha said, “I surrender myself to SHIELD.”

Coulson sighed, lowering his own gun. Natasha watched him but didn’t take advantage of the weapon being down.

_Maybe this could work_ , Clint let himself think as Coulson held out his hand and introduced himself to Natasha, his gun still held loosely in one hand. Natasha stared at his hand for a moment, as if she was either wondering what he was doing or if she should take a chance and break his wrist, before she shook it.

 

 

“Are you going to kill her?”

They’d put up thick curtains as soon as the sun had started going down, so the only light came from two ugly lamps Barton had unearthed from an old cabinet in the corner of the bedroom. The lighting wasn’t good enough to see his face.

Phil had taken the sagging couch closest to the door, while Barton was stretched out on the one under the window and Romanova was in the bedroom. It wasn’t a question of comfort; it was simply easier to block more exits if she was in the bedroom. The door was propped open with a cat statue that Barton had customised with a piece of string and a bell he’d dug out from between the cushions of his couch.

Romanova was pretending to sleep, but she kept giving herself away whenever her fate was mentioned. Small tells, like the way her breathing quickened before she caught herself, and the way her fingers twitched whenever anything relating to death came up. Phil watched her shift under the blankets.

He should have already killed her. Phil should have shot her between the eyes as soon as she’d walked into the apartment. He also should have killed Barton years before, instead of requesting that Fury take him on as an asset.

“I don’t know.” It was up to Fury but, if necessary, Phil would use another one of his favours to keep her alive. Despite the initial mess, she’d hardly resisted after Barton had confronted her and it reminded him of when he’d brought Barton in.

The initial chase, followed by something like resignation, or perhaps it was just exhaustion. Too long spent running away from or right into danger.

“You were supposed to kill me, but you didn’t.”

“You’re not supposed to know that.” That was the problem with keeping hard copies of files; no matter how much security surrounded the electronic copies, someone could always get in through the vents. It wasn’t the first time Barton had done it, and Phil knew it wouldn’t be the last.

Barton rolled over, squinting in the bright light of the lamp. “She doesn’t deserve to die. You’ve read her file. She never had a chance. If you think about it, it’s not a second chance because she didn’t even get a first one. This is the chance she never got in the first place.”

“Go to sleep, we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

“She doesn’t deserve to die,” Barton repeated.

 

 

_Barney Barton looked nothing like his younger brother. That was Phil’s first thought when he saw him, the second was that he was nothing like his brother. Barney Barton’s eyes were cold; every move he made said that he was calculating. There was no trace of any of the redeeming traits that Phil’s investigation had already found in Clint Barton. There was no remorse for his crimes, no regret visible in the footage that was still burned into Phil's eyelids: Barney Barton shooting a teenager dead because he refused to hand over his wallet. The boy had only been fifteen._

_“They said you wanted to know about my baby brother. I don’t know where he is and I don’t care.” Barton smiled; one of his teeth was chipped, another missing. “Kid thought he was better than me, wanted to be a big star.” That deserved a laugh for some reason. “Yeah, he’s a real big shot, ain’t he? Fucking government lookin' for him. What a_ star _.”_

_Morse looked disgusted from her place leaning against the plastic wall, just at the edge of Barton's peripheral vision. She was making him nervous, but there was something else there and Phil didn't like it. Barton was leaning back or turning his head slightly to leer at her._

_"Hey, gorgeous, you like tattoos?"_

_That was all Phil needed to know, really. He’d had questions about where his brother was, if he had any friends he’d be hiding out with, but there was no point._

_Barney Barton had been no better to his brother than Jacques Duquesne or Buck Chisholm had been. Phil leaned against the door, watching Barney Barton in his prison jumpsuit and handcuffs, a criminal record a mile long stretching out behind him. There was nothing to be salvaged there, nothing that SHIELD could use. He was talented, yes, but there was no empathy. He’d been taught to recognise a lost cause when he saw one, and Barney Barton was as lost as they could get. But maybe there was hope for his brother. The brother Barton had abandoned in the hospital, the one he'd left at the circus, the one he'd sent a gang he was in debt to after. Clint Barton still had a chance, Phil could feel it._

_“I’ve changed my mind,” Phil said, loud enough for Barton to hear instead of just the guards. Morse crossed the room immediately and Phil just saw Barton's arm shoot out. He didn't see Barton make contact, but he heard and saw Morse punch him, saw him rock back, shouting and swearing. The door buzzed open and Phil signalled for Morse to step out before him. She did so, smirking faintly._

_“If you find him, tell the little bastard that I say hi!” Barton yelled before the door closed. Glancing back at the window, Phil saw blood gushing from his nose._

_"That felt good," Morse said. Phil didn't have the heart to write her up for it._

 

 

SHIELD’s interview rooms were hardly any better than their holding cells, but they were air conditioned and small instead of stuffy and small.

Clint’s agent had brought someone else to the interview room; a man in a long coat and an eyepatch, who introduced himself as Director Fury. The second Director Fury, Natasha knew. She’d fought the other one a handful of times. Was Fury simply a name that was given to each director, or was this his son? His nephew?

“Director Fury wants to know why we should trust you,” Coulson said. Natasha knew exactly what he was doing and that what she’d earlier believed were slip-ups weren’t mistakes. That was interesting. He’d managed to fool her for a while.

“You’ve given me five opportunities to kill you since you met me in the safe house. You spoke to Clint when you should have kept your attention on me; you allowed me into a room with several possible weapons, including a statuette that was being used to hold a door open; you slept without a gun nearby; you were unarmed until shortly before we left the safe house and you turned down the armed guards you were offered when you informed Director Fury that you were bringing me in.” Those were only the ones that she could remember, having been preoccupied with noting every single escape route that she could find. It could have all been a trap, but Clint had trusted him, the SHIELD agent who had been kind enough to let Clint live.

Clint’s reassurances about Agent Coulson being one of the good ones had done little to relax her. The good ones were good because they got the job done, and getting the job done rarely let you be a good person. He hadn’t shot her and he’d let his guard down enough times for her to trust him, albeit with an undercurrent of uncertainty.

Fury smiled at her. “You’re going to need a new name.”

“I’m fond of Natasha Romanoff,” she said.

 

 

SHIELD had a 'you break it, you buy it' policy. Or at least it was as close as you could get to one when you worked for an agency which frequently came across geniuses halfway to putting evil in front of the word, and things that broke out of labs built in someone's spare room and started eating the neighbours. Honestly, the less Phil thought about that damn cat, the better.

SHIELD's policy came down to this: you brought them in, you became their handler. Phil was usually lucky enough to get out of that part—he’d done more than his fair share of handling when he was working with Nick long ago and he was usually doing the sort of work that meant he never had to handle anything above junior agents, especially after the Portland operation had gone wrong.

Except Barton, but he was a special case and no one else had been willing to have him. Morse was considered to be his agent by most of the other handlers, but she didn’t have an official handler, due to working in the labs most of the time. He supposed that he would be willing to take her on as an agent if Hannigan ever allowed her into the field, although Phil could understand why he didn’t want to put one of their best biologists in the field.

The smile on Fury's face when he saw Natalia Romanova, soon to be Natasha Romanoff, standing beside Coulson, eyeing him with no small measure of suspicion, told him otherwise.

"This one's yours as well," he said.

Romanova - Romanoff, he reminded himself - smiled, and it looked like she was going to eviscerate him with her knife. They'd have to work on that—and the possibility of her killing other people.

 

 

“Are you fucking Coulson?” Natasha asked one evening and, hey, Clint wasn’t a huge fan of pillow talk when it was _good_ pillow talk, but when someone started asking if you were sleeping with other people? He looked for an exit—and fast.

“Do you think I’d be sleeping with you if I was sleeping with him?” Clint kicked a pair of jeans across the floor and wished for tenth time in as many days that he had an apartment of his own, rather the box that SHIELD claimed was an apartment. He’d already sent his weekly email telling them that a bedroom and a bathroom was _not_ an apartment and he didn’t appreciate sharing a kitchen.

Natasha stopped searching through his things long enough to say, “I don’t know. You exceeded my expectations when you didn’t kill me. I already knew that you slept with Bobbi and I remember that you enjoy the company of dangerous women and competent men.”

“Don’t talk about Bobbi. That’s none of your business.” Halfway through pulling a t-shirt on, Clint asked, “Wait a minute. How low were your expectations?”

“Low. They dropped even lower when you started singing about angels.”

Oh, yeah, sleeping with her was as bad an idea as it had been the first time, but at least she couldn’t send SHIELD after him again.

 

 

Clint was trying not to fall asleep when he was supposed to be reading a file on an op when a phone started ringing. He looked towards the front of the van, where Sitwell was driving and trying not to fall asleep. It wasn’t his and the only people who ever called Clint – usually other agents, mainly Sharon, Sam, Bobbi and Natasha – wouldn’t be calling him when he was on an op.

“My mother,” Coulson said and the surprise must have shown on Clint’s face, because his lips quirked up at the edges. It was the closest thing to a smile as anyone ever got from Coulson. “You don’t believe the rumours about me being a robot, do you? I wasn’t built by Fury or Stark, or whoever they’re saying did it this week. I have a mother. I even had a father at one time.”

Clint shook his soda, sucked on the straw and ignored Sitwell’s wince when the drink rattled up the straw. “It’s not that. It’s just—no one else has living parents around here.”

His own had been dead for years, he wasn’t sure if Natasha even had parents, Fury’s parents were a huge mystery and even Hill had never been seen to do anything that hinted at some sort of family. He thought that Bobbi maybe had a brother, but they didn't get on if the one shouting match he'd heard was any indication. The only person he knew of who definitely had any living family was Sharon, and that was only because she’d confided in Clint that her aunt had known Captain America personally.

Clint had a brother (somewhere), but he’d been gone for so long that it was getting harder and harder to remember that he actually existed, and wasn’t a figment of his own imagination. The last time he’d seen Barney had been... it must have been when he was twenty-one, because he’d finally been able to throw out a fake ID he’d had for years. It hadn't even been a good meeting: Clint had just been trying to track down some thugs who'd broken his arm and it had turned out that they'd been looking for Barney because Barney had been in debt to them.

SHIELD agents didn’t usually have friends, let alone families. It was easier to put yourself in danger every day if there was no one who would miss you if you get killed.

Hell, most of Coulson’s file had REDACTED stamped across huge sections of blacked out information. Even his freaking code name was blacked out. The only concrete  things  Clint even knew about his handler were that his middle name started with a 'J' and his birthday.

“I have a sister as well, and a niece and nephew, but I don’t get to see them very often.” There was something like regret on his face at that—regret for what? Having a family when no one else did? Rarely seeing them? Putting them in danger?

Coulson sighed and settled back in his seat, but he scrolled through what Clint assumed was his contacts list on his personal StarkPhone.

“Occupational hazard,” he said eventually, locking the phone and returning it to his pocket.

Sitwell drummed his fingers against the dashboard in the front of the van, the exact same beat Clint had been tapping earlier, and gave no indication that he had heard any part of their conversation.

 

 

“Congratulations, Agent Barton, you’re now officially an agent and not an asset.”

Clint dropped down from the metal grating, landing inches from Coulson. He didn’t flinch and Clint laughed. Bobbi was going to have them out at the weekend, citing a celebration and cooking up terrifying training sessions on napkins with Natasha.

“Thanks. What does that even mean?”

“You get a funeral if you’re killed in the line of duty, any living family members are told that you are dead and you have the option of having your body preserved or being given a burial. I have to tell you that this part is voided if you are found to be working for or with the person or creature that kills you, barring mind control and friendly fire, or if you defied direct orders and were killed as a result. There are more conditions on the form. It comes with a pay rise and the option oof moving off site as well.”

He only took the form because he really wanted to know how bad he’d have to screw up to end up being frozen in a warehouse somehow and, wow, that was a long list. It ranged from reckless gun usage to purposefully killing another agent for no reason.

Clint really hoped that wasn’t something they had to worry about a lot.

“What do they tell family members?” Clint asked. None of the other stuff mattered to him -- he already had more than enough money after years of living on nothing, and there was no point in moving off base because the only person he knew who regularly went home  was Sam, and Sam never minded having people crash on his couch.  It was the death stuff that bothered him. They couldn’t tell anyone that an agent died saving the world or taking down someone who planned to kill dozens of people, could they? The security risk was too big, it had to be. Would Barney know what happened? Would he even care? “Do they tell them the truth?”

Coulson shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “They’re told that the agent died in a botched store robbery. If the body isn’t fit to be recovered, the cover story varies, but it usually involves an accident that led to an explosion.”

The idea of it felt wrong. You could save lives, die in the process, and it all came down to a lie about a robbery gone wrong. Or being blown up.

Coulson’s words in the van came back to him. _Occupational hazard_ , and Clint realised that, if someone shot him or stabbed him to death, that mother and sister and niece and nephew would probably never know that he’d stood in front of dozens of trained assassins and given kill orders to even more.

“Hey,” Clint said before Coulson reached the door, because it was the least he could do. “If anything happens, I won’t tell them the truth, but I’ll tell them that you got shot saving a kid’s life or something. Something cool.”

Coulson said, “What do you want?” instead of _thank you_ , but Clint preferred that, especially when the gratitude and relief was written all over his face.

Clint plastered on a smile that hadn’t looked fake since he stood in front of a mirror as a teenager, bruised and trembling and scared. “Target practice?”

 

 

They put together their own routine, their own way of working: Barton and Romanoff listened to Phil’s orders, but he let them make their own decisions if they thought something would work better. He suggested locations for Barton’s sniper’s nest, but didn’t order him to use any of them, only to make sure that he told Phil over the secure comm where he was.

Occasionally, Sam and Sharon would join them on ops, providing Phil with an update of the Captain America investigation if they had time. Bobbi would join them whenever they needed an extra person, and she was one of the only people who had no problem climbing into the vents and spending half the day searching for Clint. She claimed that she liked that she usually got to stick him with a needle when she found him. Clint called her cruel and she told him to stop complaining. He was relieved that she'd managed to bounch back so well after what had happened with the Phantom Rider; Clint didn't think he'd have been able to.

They had a routine. It worked well, everyone got home with their bodies and memories intact.

 

 

One of the perks of having a handler who acknowledged your existence when they weren’t sending you on an op was that Coulson had pretty much given Clint and Natasha free reign of his office whenever he was using it, and sometimes when he was. They usually had to share it with Sharon and Sam, and sometimes Bobbi, but it was better than the desk in his cramped quarters. Today Clint was poking at the perky little fern that was the latest addition to Coulson's office greenhouse when Cambridge walked in. Clint didn't really like him -- he was one of the ones who'd found it absolutely hilarious that Clint had ran away to join the circus -- but he was better than nothing. 

“We’ve got a job for you, straight from the World Security Council.”

“Finally.” Clint kicked the chair on the other side of Coulson’s desk out. “Give me something I can get my teeth into, and none of that surveillance bullshit. If I want to watch people doing nothing, I'll sit on the roof here all day.”

It would probably be more interesting as well. He'd never thought that drug dealers and people traffickers could lead such dull lives before he'd joined SHIELD, and that wasn't even touching on the scientists.

“We need you to shoot someone in Budapest,” he offered.

“Sounds good. Who’s on it?”

“No one you know. All of your usual partners are already in the field, and most of the ones you’ve already worked with... well, they won’t work with you.”

That wasn’t a surprise. Clint was sure that Simmons hadn’t been allowed out in the field for a few years after Coulson had written up the report on Clint’s close call in the middle of a heatwave. He still wasn't allowed to work with inexperienced agents. “Coulson?”

“Keeping an eye on Stark. We don’t want him recognising the tails, do we?”

“Romanoff?”

“In Las Vegas, tracking down an ex-assassin who has some information that we want.”

That was code for playing innocent until it worked, or she decided it wouldn’t work and started dangling people in front of trains until they wet themselves. Clint had watched it happen enough times. One had wriggled too much, and they’d had to peel him off the tracks. They hadn’t been able to get the information they’d been looking for.

“Wilson? Carter?”

“Both in Miami, trying to find out who’s been experimenting with inducing telepathy.”

_Come on, come on, there has to be someone around who isn’t going to get me killed or leave me in the field to die if something goes wrong. Someone, anyone, just someone who’s smart enough to run an op and not try to control every inch of it._

“Sitwell?” Jasper was good. Bobbi liked him and he was friends with Coulson, so even though they hardly knew each other, Clint was more than prepared to take the chance.

“In New York. He’s working on the other end of the telepathy op.”

The op was going to be a disaster, Clint could feel it in his blood--blood he was sure was going to end up on the floor of a cell in Budapest. Or maybe splattered across a wall.

 

 

There was no sign of the target. Clint _hated it_ when there was no sign of the target. It usually meant an ambush or that wired had been crossed somewhere and he was miles away from where he should have been. The WSC’s target was supposed to be a businessman with links to under the table arms deals. Clint hadn’t seen anything approaching a businessman in the area. Not even a suit that was too expensive for their job, and that was usually a huge give away.

Which meant that there was no target, the target hadn’t turned up, or the WSC wanted him to do something else and hadn’t been willing to tell him what it really was.

“What are those things?” someone screamed nearby. Clint heart sank. He’d been right. He should have known that he’d be right about something being off. It was the third one. Of course it was the third one. It was always the worst case scenario for him. The WSC should have been the tell; the were always up to something.

Clint took a deep breath and looked around the corner. He immediately wished he hadn’t.

Standing ten feet tall, with six fingers on each hand, each with a long sharp claw, their scaly skin glistened in the sunlight. Blood dripped from their claws and teeth, and something yellow dripped from their fangs.

He didn’t know what they were, and he wasn’t in any hurry to find out. Oh, God, he’d known that the op was going to go down the toilet. He should have turned it down and ran in the opposite direction—or at least waited for Natasha or Sam to get back. Sam was great for these ops; being a social worker had apparently given him a great bullshit meter. Or Sharon. Sharon loved getting her hands dirty.

The closest lizard thing opened its mouth and screamed. It sounded like a baby was screaming into a microphone. Clint silently thanked R&D for the ear protection he'd been given and started to run.

 

 

“What do you mean you lost him?” Coulson’s voice could be heard in the corridor. Sam pitied the poor agent who was probably cowering in his seat by now. Coulson didn’t get angry very often – Sam had only seen it happen twice before – but when he did, it was always the sort of anger that reminded Sam of the ex-soldiers SHIELD hired. “I’m sorry, but I was unaware that you were allowed to send an agent who outranks you into a dangerous situation.” A pause where Sam assumed the agent was trying to explain himself. “No agent is sent on an operation for the World Security Council without it going past Director Fury first.”

Oh _shit_. Sam heard Sharon gasp and Bobbi almost took one of her fingers off with the knife she was examining. Fury was going to hit the roof when he found out. Sam threw her a pack of tissues so that Bobbi could wrap one around her finger.

“Agent Romanoff isn’t supposed to be back for two days.”

_Natasha’s back?_ Sam mouthed.

Bobbi shrugged. _Must be. Got a message from her yesterday, saying she was heading out again_.

They all jumped when Coulson walked out of the agent’s office, slamming the door behind him.

“This is bad, isn’t it?” Sharon asked. Coulson nodded and started to walk. None of them hesitated before following him. “How bad?”

“Barton was sent on an operation for the WSC, an operation which hadn’t been cleared by Fury before it reached Barton. Romanoff returned yesterday, discovered what had happened, threatened the agent in charge and left for Budapest without informing anyone else.”

“So where are we going?” Sam asked. Coulson opened his mouth, but Sam shook his head. “We’re not letting anyone else go on their own: we’ve already lost two people in the last two days.”

They weren’t classed as one of the official SHIELD teams, but Sam knew that their group had worked together on various ops more often than those teams anyway, which made them a team in their own right. And the good teams didn’t abandon people because the ops went bad.

Coulson looked from face to face, lingering on Bobbi, who just raised an eyebrow as if daring him to argue with her. Eventually, he sighed.  
“Get your bags. We’re going to Budapest.”

 

 

“This is a bad idea,” Sam said quietly as they crept through one of the basements. The water was halfway up his calves and part of the wall at one side had been demolished, bricks still occasionally dropping down into the water. It looked like it had been done by one of Clint’s arrows, but Phil wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the lizards had managed it. “It’s worse than them sending Clint here in the first place, and that was monumentally stupid.”

“That’s the World Security Council for you,” Bobbi said, and shrugged when Phil shot her a reproachful look. “Don’t look at me like that. You say it all the time.” She was making her way along what remained of the floor above, keeping an eye out for anymore of the creatures. There was a gun in one of her hands and her battle staves were tucked in the thigh holsters.

“In private.” Phil had never thought that any other agents had heard his opinions on the WSC—other than Fury, but his and Hill’s own opinions were of the sort that couldn’t be repeated in polite company. Or impolite company. She'd been taking too many cues from Barton; he suspected that they had their own training sessions involving the ventilation system and the gap between the floors.

Something creaked at the other end of the room and Phil stopped, slowly reaching for his gun.

Behind him, he heard Sharon ask, “What the hell are those?”

The creatures looked even worse than they had on the surveillance footage. Phil hoped that it was just perspective, because the last thing they needed was the creatures growing larger every day. It turned, its huge head dripping blood from one of its eyes; it looked like it had been gouged out and Phil suspected that it wasn't very happy about it, if the snarling sound it was making was any indication. 

Above him, Bobbi swore.  "Anyone think they can hit its other eye?"

Sharon drew her gun and fired, but the bullets did nothing. Neither did the knife Sam aimed at its throat. They simply bounched off its thick skin. Sharon ducked the bullet that ricocheted off the lizard and then off the wall, and was gone in seconds. Phil looked around for her, hoping that she hadn't hit her head and slipped under the water, but turned back towards the lizard as it started to approach them. It only had one eye, and it was having trouble fitting in the basement, but that didn't make it any less threatening, especially since there was something dripping from its teeth.

“It’s got friends!” Sam shouted, and Bobbi jumped down from the floor above, landing with a splash a few feet from Phil. "Should we run for it?"

"Not in this half; we can't outrun it in the water." Bobbi stabbed at its injured eye with one of her battle staves. It roared and one clawed hand shot towards her. On the floor above, something roared, but it didn't sound like one of the creatures. "Okay, so it didn't like that and it's not slowing it down. Anyone got any other ideas?"

Sharon's face appeared above them, her hair and face flecked with blood. She was holding something, but Phil couldn't make it out in the gloom. "Catch!"

“Sharon found something that should help!” Bobbi shouted, catching and throwing a chainsaw to him. Phil stared at it for a second before he turned to the creature that was still advancing on them. It was worth a shot. He switched it on and drew it across the creature’s throat.

Unlike the knife and bullet, it didn’t bounce off or slide across its skin, it’s sliced right through, spraying blood across the wall of the basement.

It thrashed, taking out most of the pipes and spraying water across the room, its sharp tail leaving a nasty gash on his back, but eventually went still. Phil wiped the blood from his hands and looked up. Sharon and Sam had finished with their ones and Bobbi was standing on top of hers, looking disappointed.

“There’s no kill like overkill,” she said, wiping the floor from the chainsaw on the creature’s skin. “Where do you think the others went?”

"There were thirty on the original footage, so we're missing at least sixteen, maybe less if there's anything buried under the rubble." Sharon was picking pieces of lizard off her field suit.

“They’ll have gone looking for shelter. We already know that they hate the cold, so they’ll try to stay indoors, which means that Romanoff and Barton should be looking to go outside—assuming she was able to find him.” Phil stopped talking as the ground shook beneath them. “What was that?”

“Our cue to get the hell out of here.” Sam wiped some of the slime from his hands. "Keep your chainsaws."

 

 

All Clint could hear in his right ear was the ringing. He didn’t know if the damage would be permanent, but he didn’t have time to stand around and worry about something that wasn’t going to kill him in the near future. The lizard things couldn’t creep worth a damn, every footstep hitting the ground hard enough that Clint could feel it perfectly, as long as he wasn’t wearing his boots.

_The lizards coming at him, their lips drawn back to reveal that their teeth were fangs, dripping what looked like poison._

_I liked those boots_ , he thought as he waded through yet another flooded basement. The lizards didn’t seem to like basements, or maybe they were too stupid to find their way out, because they’d destroyed half of the pipes. He’d ditched his ripped shirt and pants for a tunic he’d taken from one of the apartments. Either everyone had been evacuated or they’d had the common sense to run when they’d seen the giant lizards in the buildings. Or the lizards had eaten them, but Clint hoped it wasn’t that one.

_Fumbling with the explosives, praying that they'd still working, hoping that there was no one else in the building._

_Drip_. Footsteps nearby. Small feet, light tread, very little noise. He knew those footsteps almost as well as he knew his own.

Natasha dropped down in front of him, stumbling forward a few steps. Her hair was wet and escaping from her bun, and there was a cut on one side of her fact that looked like it stung.

“I’ve never been so glad to see you in my life,” he said, throwing his arms around her and pulling her close. She was cold and sticky, but she was familiar and _not_ a lizard. “I almost got eaten by a lizard and I had to blow up a basement to get away. It’s not as fun as it sounds.”

_Running, but then the ear protection slipped and Clint just heard himself swear before it felt like someone dug a  nail into his ear  and swirled it around._

“I know.” Natasha sat down on the nearest step and rolled up the leg of her pants, revealing a nasty gash across her thigh, still bleeding heavily. “Word of advice: stay away from the tails. Please tell me you have a first aid kit with you.”

Clint didn’t even know where his bag was. He was pretty sure he’d dropped it when the explosives had detonated, which meant that it was still in one of the flooded basements. He hadn’t seen a first aid kit since then—he hadn’t even seen another person.

“Hold on.” It wasn’t the best solution, but everything above his waist had stayed dry in the basements, which meant that the top half of his stolen tunic was probably going to make a better bandage than anything else they found. He pulled it down and cut it off at the waist with one of the few knives he’d managed to salvage. God, Clint missed his bow. The WSC had had him searched to make sure that he hadn't tried to sneak it on the plane. He would have sold his soul for something that he could shoot. Arrowheads were good, but he had to get close to use them, and those things had sharp teeth. The guns were useless after being submerged.

Natasha cut it into strips and started to wrap it around her leg. “I think Coulson’s coming after us.”

“Yeah.” Clint laughed. “He has this thing about not letting people die in the field. We need to get out of here before more lizards come along, though, or he'd not going to get the chance to find us.”

She tied it off and secured it with some purple safety pins that looked like she'd stolen them from the box Clint had given Coulson as a joke gift at Christmas. "Higher ground? There are some hills nearby."

"Hills sound good." 

 

 

Falling asleep was a bad idea. No one was coming for them, after all, and most of the lizard things were going to be killed when the building went up in flames in a few minutes. He should have taken more clothes from that last apartment, grabbed a first aid kit or _something_ that would be useful. There were a few mini bottles of vodka, a bandage that was too dirty and covered in slime (like them and anything else that had come into contact with the lizard things) to be useful.

At least they were far enough away from the lizards. That was comforting. What wasn’t comforting was how quiet Natasha had been since they’d reached the top of the hill and taken shelter under the trees.

The ground vibrated with the force of the explosion. Clint pressed his face into the crook of his arm and turned his head so that only his good ear was exposed so that he could concentrate on the sounds around them. Distant sirens, the faint sounds of people screaming, the sudden clamour of birds overhead.

Wait...

Clint raised his head, squinting in the bright sunlight.

“The birds,” he said, shaking Natasha. “Tasha, Tasha, come on, I really need you to wake up now.” Nothing. _Fuck, come on, don’t you die here. It was only supposed to be a simple op, it wasn’t supposed to get anyone killed._ He searched for the edge of what remained of the top part of the tunic, slightly stick with a mixture of dry, drying and fresh blood, fumbling his way under it to dig his fingers in as close to the wound as possible.

The reaction was immediate. Natasha’s fist came up and caught him square in the face; Clint felt his nose break—he _heard_ his nose break; that was disgusting.

One hand over his bleeding nose, Clint gestured to the trees around them. “The birds, look at the birds.”

Natasha turned her face up towards the sky, the shadows of the leaves hiding some of the bruises, and smiled.

The trees around them were full of birds, so many different species that Clint didn’t think he could name them all with that bird-watching book he’d found under one of the desks. And they were going fucking insane.

“Sam,” was all Natasha said before she was dragging herself up from the ground. Clint forced himself to his feet, holding on to the tree trunk to keep his balance as he stumbled towards the peak of the hill, staying close enough to Natasha that he'd be able to catch her if she fell.

 

 

“You’re a hard man to find,” Bobbi called over the roar of the engine. It wasn’t a Quinjet, which meant that they probably weren’t supposed to be here, but Clint worry about that later—probably about the same time he’d worry about how he still couldn’t hear anything with his right ear.

“You escaped from the lab,” Clint said, grabbing the towel Coulson threw him.

“I was going stir-crazy in there. Coulson broke me out.” Bobbi looked him up and down, raising an eyebrow. “What are you _wearing_?”

He knew he’d forgotten something. “It’s a tunic.”

“It’s a skirt,” Natasha said. She was changing out of her ripped and bloody clothes, rolling them up and dumping them in a bag. Coulson held out one of the plastic-looking suits for her, his eyes fixed on the wall of the Quinjet. “It stopped being a tunic when you ripped the top off.”

“I should have let you bleed to death,” Clint groused and started trying to peel off the bloody tun--oh, fuck it, Natasha was right; he’d been wearing a skirt for the last day and a half, and a pink one at that. He hoped that the surveillance footage from inside the plane didn’t fall into the wrong hands. The last thing he wanted was photos of him wearing a skirt to be passed around SHIELD. He’d rather they got hold of flyers from any of the circuses he’d worked at—some of those outfits had been terrible.

Actually, the last thing he wanted was for Sharon and Sam to choose that moment to turn around. They both did identical double takes before Sharon looked at Bobbi.

“He does have the legs for it,” Sharon said. Bobbi nodded in agreement.

“I think this is sexual harassment.”

Coulson threw one of the suits to him. “Barton, take the tunic off and put the suit on before it becomes blackmail material.”

“It already is blackmail material.” Bobbi grinned and took a photo with her StarkPhone. She showed it to Natasha, who nodded her approval. God, sometimes Clint hated that they liked each other. They were twice as terrifying together.

Sam was using wet wipes to try and get some of the slime off his hands. It wasn’t working very well. “Am I the only one who’s forgotten what this job used to be like before we were chasing things that wanted to kill us around basements and sewers?”

“It’s always been like this,” Phil said. “I spent my first week in the field tracking down mercenaries. I had to carry out one of their jobs for them after I eliminated them.” At Clint’s questioning look he shrugged. “The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.”

"But sometimes the handler of your friend is a fortune cookie." Bobbi was digging through a coolbox full of food. "Coulson, your friend had a plane and gave us food? You need to ask him to join SHIELD."

"No way in hell!" came the yell from the front of the plane. "I'm not fucking insane!"

Clint assumed that was the pilot--and Coulson's friend, from the sound of it.

“I should have stayed in my old job. There was less slime involved.” Sam dropped his ruined shirt in a bio-hazard box. “I miss chasing mercenaries and the occasional scientist-turned-terrorist.”

“I was a biologist; slime was how I ended up at SHIELD.” Bobbi snapped a photo and then took another one when Clint flipped her off. “I ran a sample and it came back with all sorts of toxins in it. SHIELD turned up at the lab less than half an hour later. What about you, Sharon?”

Okay, it was obviously becoming a conversation about what they’d done before they’d ended up being recruited by SHIELD.

“Joined of my own free will,” Sharon said, but she didn’t mention that her aunt had been her inspiration (Clint had never read the personal parts of the personnel files; hers had been in her entrance interview). She was watching Coulson suspiciously. “Clint?”

“I got on their radar, Coulson didn’t kill me. Same story as every other asset.” And speaking of Coulson... “How did you join SHIELD, sir?” Clint asked, tagging on the ‘sir’ only because he knew that was a sure way to catch people off-guard. They never expected him to show any respect for authority, which was understandable; he only respected the authority of the ones who were good at their jobs.

Coulson had finished bagging what was left of Natasha’s clothing. He sealed it (all five flaps secured, all pieces of attached tape used) and locked it in the bio-hazard box. Always following protocol to the letter--well, unless he decided that a bad decision had been made somewhere, or that the rules were going to get someone killed when it could be easily avoided.

“I was an Army Ranger,” he said and, hey, Clint had never thought of that one before. He’d gone through dozens of possibilities, ranging from scientist (had been struck off the list after he’d seen Bobbi shoo Coulson out of the labs) to an accountant (Hill had laughed when she’d heard the rumour; that had been enough to take that one off the table). Hill never laughed. It had been terrifying.

It still didn’t explain anything, though. How did an Army Ranger end up at SHIELD. Clint was about to ask when Sharon crossed the small space in a few steps and tugged Coulson’s suit jacket up just enough to expose a patch of blood at his lower back.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

 

 

The wound wasn’t very big, at least by Clint’s standards but he’d pulled arrows from his shoulders and had been shot in the leg, so his standards were high.

“Its tail caught me when I was cutting its head off,” Coulson said, wincing when Clint poked at the wound with a cotton bud. Payback was only fair. At least they had a proper first aid kit and not the small pile of junk Clint had stolen from Medical during his first month with SHIELD.

“So, sir, how does an Army Ranger end up working for SHIELD? Accidentally invade a base? Take out some of SHIELD’s targets and get offered a job instead of jail time?”

“No, nothing like that.” He hardly flinched when Clint pushed the needle through the skin. Impressive. “A friend of mine got mixed up in SHIELD’s business and asked me for help. Once it was all sorted out, they made me a job offer. My re-enlistment was coming up, but SHIELD pulled a few strings to make them let me go early.”

“We should be landing in about fifteen minutes,” Sharon called from up front. “You might want to stop stitching him up in ten.”

“Got it! Must’ve been some friend.” Most of Clint’s friends had been the sort of people who were more likely to hand you over to the people looking for you, rather than the ones you called to help you out of a tight spot. Then again, before SHIELD, he hadn’t been in a position to only make friends with the people he actually liked.

“He is.”

Huh. The only people Clint knew that Coulson spent a significant amount of time with who  weren't currently on the plane were Hill, Fury and Sitwell. Clint had heard the story of how Hill had been plucked out a strike team by Fury and assigned to lead one, and Sitwell's recruitment in the middle of a hostage situation was a SHIELD legend. “How did you find us, anyway?”

“We finished up our ops and made arrangements to meet in my office. The notes you left in my copy of your personnel file weren’t very subtle.”

“Subtlety wasn’t what I was going for.” Some of  the diagrams hadn't been necessary, but who'd pass up a  chance to draw a caricature of the WSC?

“Speaking of subtlety; what’s wrong with your ear?”

Clint almost stabbed him with the needle, moving his hand just in time to put it through his own thumb instead. He looked back at the others, but Bobbi was comparing something with Sam, Natasha was leaning against the wall in a way that said she was dozing but would be awake in a second if she had to be, even with the pain meds, and Sharon was up front with the pilot.

“Nothing,” he muttered, pulling the needle out and switching it out for a clean one.

“You’ve not let anyone get on your left side since Budapest. Not even Natasha.” The way Coulson said it, carefully calm as if he thought that saying it the wrong way would set Clint off.

The truth was that he still couldn’t hear anything with his rightear. Absolutely nothing. He’d only been able to hear the Quinjet approaching when he’d turned so that his right ear was closer to it. Clint managed the last couple of switches, biting the inside of his cheek until he could taste blood, before he tucked the needle away and didn’t try to hide the way his hands started to shake.

“There was an explosion; we had to blow up part of the basement in one of the buildings,” he said, trying not to panic and have the words spill out in a jumble he couldn’t control. _And now I’m deaf. What good is an assassin who can only hear with one ear? How long will it take for SHIELD to let me go?_ “I think the earmuffs were too loose, though, because they slipped when I hit the ground. I didn’t have time to fix them before the arrowhead exploded. I couldn’t hear anything when I woke up after it.”

If he really thought about it, Clint could remember the way that everything had gotten louder and louder in his right ear, the earmuff digging into his neck, before it became a constant scream and then…. Nothing. It had hurt for a while, but now it was just silence on that side.  
“How’s Project Lazarus going?” he asked, hoping to distract Coulson before any of the inevitable questions came up.

Coulson shook his head. “Terribly. The last subject woke up without any memories and the one before him tried to kill the staff from Medical when they tried to examine him—and don’t try to change the subject,” but there was humour there to soften the words. “Barton, when we get back to HQ and you’re cleaned up, you need to go to Medical.”

“I need a senior agent for that.”

“Meet me in my office and I’ll go with you.” Coulson tugged down his shirt until the stitches were covered before he turned around. Clint cleared his throat awkwardly, fidgeting with the first aid kit.

“You don’t need to do that.” He'd spent time in hospital with  no  one there when he was a kid; he could handle it without Coulson holding his hand the whole time--which of  course made him think of Coulson sleeping with his hand under the pillow, or maybe actually holding his hand at some point.

“I want to.”

“Five minutes!” Sharon called. “Put anything sharp away, I don’t want a repeat of last week; we’re never getting the blood off the seats. And, Coulson, Jimmy says you 'owe him big-time for this bullshit.'”

 

 

Clint had spent his time in the decontamination shower scraping dried slime out from under his fingernails and wondering what he’d do when SHIELD inevitably let him go for being deaf in one ear. Working with Natasha wouldn’t be an option, not when she’d managed to make herself something like a home here. Maybe he could find Barney and see what he was doing, if he was out of prison. He’d still be able to make a decent amount of money in a circus, as long as he steered clear of anyone he’d known in the past.

“Well, that explosion certainly did a number on you,” Doctor Matthews said as he moved around to Clint’s left side. “The good news is that we see this particular kind of damage quite a lot; it should be listed as an occupational hazard.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Coulson asked. Clint didn’t look away from picking at a loose thread on his sleeve. Coulson had his own hands in the pockets of his suit jacket, as calm as he usually was. He’d carefully stood to Clint’s left, staying in his peripheral vision, close enough to see but far enough away that he wouldn’t get in Matthews’ way.

“I can’t do anything personally, and surgery isn’t the best option. The good thing about those explosive arrows is that the long range physical damage from an explosion caused by them leaves the wounds very neat, if you pardon the expression. After a few weeks of healing, you should be ready for a hearing aid. R&D already has specially made ones that can be switched out for any ops—and they come with integrated comm systems.” At Clint’s puzzled glance, he held up his hands in a _what can you do?_ gesture. “Doctor Pym assisted in the development of that part.”

“You won’t be able to turn off your earpiece in the middle of an op,” Coulson smiled and Clint laughed in spite of the sick feeling that lingered in the pit of his stomach.

It wasn’t fixable, but it could be managed. That was good. Maybe SHIELD wouldn’t kick him to the kerb as soon as word reached Fury.  
“How long will it take? For the hearing aid to be made, I mean.”

“A week or two, no longer. They’ll have to take some measurements and teach you to insert and remove the hearing aid, but that’s going to be enough time for your ear to heal.”

“Factor in the adjustment period and you’ll be back to work in a month—no less,” he added when Clint opened his mouth to protest. “The last thing we need is for an op to go wrong because you didn’t want to wait an extra few weeks.”

Doctor Matthews hummed to himself as he flipped through Clint’s medical file, a skinny thing that mainly contained some old x-rays and the results of some tests that Clint had been forced into when he’d first joined SHIELD.

Oh, shit.

“Where was your last blood test, Agent Barton?” Matthews asked, and Coulson’s irritated expression let Clint know that he’d just realised that Clint had been skipping the later tests.

Sighing, Clint held out his arm. “Get it over with.”

 

 

“Where have you been?” Sharon called they had eventually been released from Medical two hours and a battery of tests later, Phil following a few feet behind Barton, taking care to stay on his left. Sharon was sitting on the wing of the Quinjet they’d come back in, her leg heavily bandaged and a crutch beside her. Judging from the slightly sloppy smile on her face, she’d been given some of the good drugs. Sam, always the guardian angel (according to several junior agents who whispered and blushed whenever he glanced at them; Phil was glad he wasn’t in charge of a team of junior agents) was standing beside her.

“Medical,” Barton said and winced when Natasha stepped out of the shadows and yanked up his sleeve. “Tasha, I’m fine. See? Just some bruising from where they drew blood.”

Not to mention took fresh tissue samples. A few seconds of careful prodding at the injection sites, and she let go, apparently satisfied.  
“Anything nice?” Barton asked Morse, who was rooting through the pile of weapons they’d salvaged from the warehouse, the sling she should have been wearing lying a few feet away. “Agent Coulson?” Smith asked, casting a wary glance at the other agents. “Director Fury asked me to update you on Project Lazarus.”

“Has there been any progress?” It wasn’t Phil’s project, but it was close enough to being connected to the search for Captain America that he’d taken an interest in it. He watched Barton push a camera into Romanoff’s hands, throw his arm around Morse and pose with a chainsaw while Romanoff took photos. Sam lifted himself up beside Sharon, steadying her with one hand as he crouched down beside her.  
“No, sir, but we’re expanding our research into the agents who donated their bodies to SHIELD when they died.”

Barton pulled Romanoff over beside him, throwing the camera to Sam, reached around Sharon to take the photographs. The camera went back and forth between the agents – Barton took a photo of Morse standing on the wing of the Quinjet, her saw in one hand and a battle stave in the other; Sam took one of Romanoff and Sharon sitting laughing as Barton tried to do the same as Morse and almost fell. Barton’s revenge was a quick snap of Sam holding an armful of the saws, trying to tell Barton to _put the camera down or I’m going to drop you the next time you pull something stupid_.

“Come on, sir, we made sure that R&D didn’t get your saw.” Morse held it in one hand as she tried to tug the camera away from Barton, who clung on to it until Romanoff pinched his arm and he let go with a yelp. “Thanks, Natasha.”

Phil knew that he’d have to tell Morse to put her sling on, and tell Sharon to keep the weight off her injured leg, as well as making sure that Barton kept us his visits with Medical. Thankfully Sam wasn’t fond of ignoring his own injuries or avoiding appointments with Medical. It would most likely add up to less than an hour, but it was an hour that was as close as they’d get to normal for the foreseeable future.

 

 

Somewhere along the line, taking a table in the mess hall had become a part of their routine. Clint and Natasha were almost always there first, often, and Sam tended to arrive after Clint had worked his way through a slice of apple pie and custard that was always mysteriously available, with Sharon arriving soon after. Bobbi usually turned up with or shortly before Coulson, and always stole some of Clint’s pie.

Even the giant evil lizards in Budapest hadn’t ruined their routine--although the table had needed to be replaced afterwards. For an organisation full of people who saw terrifying things every day, SHIELD agents got awfully twitchy when acidic venom and hazmat were mentioned, even when they’d all been wearing hazmat suits and had gone through the decontamination showers before they’d sat down.

“Coffee,” Sharon groaned, throwing herself down into her usual empty seat between Sam and Natasha.

Clint stopped picking gravel out of the treads of his boots with one of Natasha’s knives -- it had been cracked by the clay-dragon-thing a few weeks before, it wasn’t useful for anything else -- to push the coffee pot across the table. Waste not, want not or whatever that poster pinned to the wall behind SHIELD’s recycling bins said. Was it about trees or bees, or was that the one beside it?

“Where’s Coulson?” Clint asked her, taking advantage of Sharon’s mouth being full.

“In a meeting with Fury and Hill. He told me that it won’t be over until the early hours of the morning. Stark’s that bad?” Bobbi asked Sharon, her face sympathetic.

Clint went back to picking the gravel out of his boots, only half listening to the conversation around him. The only other time he could remember Fury, Coulson and Hill having a meeting together, late at night, had been when he and Phil had come back with Natasha in tow. In fact, that was the _only_ time he knew they’d had a meeting at night. There had been one before Sharon had been assigned to tail Stark, but it had been in the middle of the afternoon.

“He went out to dinner at two in the morning and the bill was more than the amount I paid for my first car. I had to spend two hours in a club while he chatted up and took home two models.” She grimaced as she finished the coffee. “That’s disgusting, did you take it from Phil’s private stash?”

Plucking the knife from between Clint’s fingers, Natasha said, “He moved it three days ago after Clint spilled coffee grounds when he was getting some to take on the op.” She used the knife to dig a SHIELD issue tracker from a new pair of boots before offering it to Sam.

“I’m good. I’d rather they be able to find me if I get shot out of the sky,” he said. “So, Stark’s really as bad as the stories say?”

“Worse. He’s never on time for anything and he never goes to meetings, even the ones he’s supposed to run. Pepper Potts, however, is even more impressive than the tabloids claim.” Sharon ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it back into a ponytail without even putting her coffee down. “I feel sorry for whoever gets stuck on this Avengers Initiative if Fury ever gets it off the ground--and he wants more of them. You’d think Stark would be more than enough. He could talk SHIELD’s enemies into giving up. An hour with him and they’d be begging to be interrogated by Natasha.”

“They’ll give it to Phil,” Sam said. “He’ll be the one making sure that the Avengers don’t get any of our agents killed and making sure Hill doesn’t kill any of them--and he’ll want both of you on the team.”

Natasha arched an eyebrow. “They still call me a security threat when they think I can’t hear them. I don’t think they’re going to want me to be a part of the Avengers Initiative.”

“You’re the best at what you do: Fury wants the best. I’m betting that the two of you,” Sam gestured at Clint and Natasha with his spoon, “at least reach the shortlist. Why else would the big three be having meetings in the middle of the night?”

Bobbi stole what was left of Clint’s pie, ignoring his half-hearted complaints. “I’d hold you to that, but we all know you’re right. Daisy thinks that they’re going to recruit geniuses first, then they’re going to go looking for the ones with abilities—remember Carol?”

As the conversation drifted off to people with _abilities_ (he’d never heard of, let alone met most of them), Clint took Natasha’s knife back to dig out his own tracker (there was one in his phone that Coulson, Sitwell and his friends knew how to activate; that was all he needed).

The Avengers Initiative was never going to happen, anyway. It was one of those things that was kicked around every so often, but never amounted to anything.

 

 

Fury’s second office was more of a conference room. It was also soundproofed, had more surveillance than even the rooms with the highest security in the building, and was almost completely ornamental; Phil couldn’t remember the last time it had been used.

Hill was sitting in one of the handful of chairs in the room, several files spread out across the table in the middle.

“We’ve got a problem,” Fury said as soon as Coulson shut the soundproof door. “Tony Stark was reported missing by Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes fifteen minutes ago.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

iv. _**The boy’s no good. The boy is just no good**_

__

**Year Four**

 

“It could have been worse.”

“Barton, if you have to say it could have been worse, it’s bad enough already.”

It was. Three hours earlier, the concert hall had been a beautiful sight, the lights in and around it enough to illuminate the entire street. Now it was little more than a cooling ruin, the architecture ruined by the fire and the water used to put it out. It was shame. Phil had visited it a few times in the past and had liked to take one last look at it before he got in a cab to go home. The place where he usually caught a cab was only a few feet away from the brick wall he was sitting on, but it might as well have been a hundred miles. The view was nothing like it had been such a short time ago.

Barton was sitting on the brick wall beside him, bent over with his one arm across his knees and the other drawn close to his chest. It didn’t look broken or dislocated, which was usually the sort of injury he tried to hide (most likely out of habit, judging from the number of old breaks and fractures on his x-rays) so it took Phil a few minutes to do a scan of his arm. His hand and wrist looked fine, as did his forearm ( _but keep an eye on that bruising_ ) but it was his shoulder that caught Phil’s eyes.

The skin was red and raw, not burned enough to need urgent treatment, but bad enough that Phil was sure that moving it would hurt.

“Let me see,” he said, raising his own arm slightly and moving to straddle the wall, but not making any move to touch Barton. Barton hesitated, shoulders hunching a little before he straightened up and shuffling back a few inches so that Phil could get a better look at the burn.

It was definitely one of the more minor injuries he’d had, and it looked like Barton had already had plenty of cold water on it, which was a relief.

“It’s nothing,” Barton muttered as Phil careful examined the skin around the burn for signs of anything else. “Tasha and Bobbi almost drowned me when they saw it, they took care of it.”

Phil ignored him and dug the burn ointment out of the first aid kit. “Hold still or you’ll need another trip down to Medical.”

Barton didn’t even flinch when Phil started applying the lotion--and he knew from experience that it stung like nothing on earth for the first ten seconds or so.

“I’ve had worse.”

“I know.” Between the x-rays showing all the healed breaks and fractures, and the scars Phil had seen over the years, Phil had a pretty good picture of what little he hadn’t known about Barton’s life when they’d first met. It wasn’t a very nice picture. It took longer than he would have liked, but Barton eventually relaxed, uncoiling fractionally with every slow rub of Phil’s thumb against unburned skin. “Better?”

“It was fine in the first place,” he muttered, but made no move to pull away until Phil had finished applying the ointment and secured a small bandage over it, making sure that it wasn’t too tight. All the tension had gone out of him and he was half leaning against Phil, his eyelids beginning to droop.

“Hey.” Phil nudged him gently. “I need you to go and find Romanoff before you go to sleep.”

“Sure.” Barton stood up, rubbing at his eyes with one hand and picking up his bow with the other, a little unsteady but otherwise fine. He blinked a few times, read the slogan off a billboard halfway down the block and smiled.

Phil watched him go, disappearing into the throng of SHIELD agents and firemen, before shrugging off the lingering feeling of his skin under Phil’s fingers. He had a job to do, and that job was to make sure that everyone was past the tape they’d put up around the edges of the plaza. And someone obviously wasn’t. Phil didn’t recognise her as any of the women who’d been taken over to the medics for medical attention, but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t wandered off after being checked out.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he approached her, holding up his ID badge.

“Oh, I’m fine. I think I’ll need a new cello, though.” She smiled and held up the splintered remains of the instrument, letting out a nervous little laugh. “I don’t think it was made for beating someone unconscious. They didn’t tell us to prepare for this,” she gestured to the smouldering ruins of the concert hall, “during rehearsals. Fires, sure. People with cannons that shoot fire? Not so much.”

“I’d shake your hand, but...” Phil held up his hand to show her the layer of greasy looking ointment on his hand. “It’s burn ointment.”

“People were seriously hurt?”

“It’s okay, it was nothing too serious. You shouldn’t really be here right now, there was a loss of structural integrity because of the fire and we’re trying to keep everyone away from the building.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I just wanted to get one last look before I caught a cab back to my hotel.” She was shivering slightly in the cool breeze, her dress doing little to keep her warm. Phil dug his cell phone and the keys to one of SHIELD’s cars out of his pockets and slipped off his suit jacket, holding it out to her. “I can’t take that.”

“I’m wearing a lot more clothing than you.”

“I’ll make sure to give it back before I leave,” she promised, smiling at him as she pulled the jacket on, folding her arms to close it at the front.

 

 

Sam and Sharon were sitting in the back of one of the trucks, Sam carefully examining the singed ends of Sharon’s hair.

“I’m not cutting it off. You can wait until tomorrow or ask someone else to do it when we get back to HQ.”

“And have to deal with it breaking off whenever I move? Sam, just cut it off, please. My aunt's visiting and she's going to get worried if she sees that my hair's burnt.”

“‘Scuse me, sir?” Smith called, weaving his way through the other agents, Phil’s jacket held aloft. “A woman gave this to me and asked me to give it to you, and to thank you for ‘keeping her warm tonight.’ Her words, not mine,” he added, blushing.

Sharon and Sam exchanged a look, both clearly fighting the urge to smile or laugh.

Phil slipped his hands into the pockets and immediately withdrew as if burned, a thin piece of card held between two fingers. He stared at it. It definitely hadn’t been there earlier; he would have noticed it when he’d taken his cell phone out to give it to the cellist.

_Claire Costello_ and a number under it, each number carefully printed so that there was no chance of mixing up the one and the seven. Phil looked around for any sign of the woman, but there was nothing.

“Did she give you her number, sir?” Sharon asked, leaning forward to get a better look.

“Get back to work, Sharon.”

“Why do they get called Sharon, Sam and Bobbi, and I get called Barton?” Barton piped up, appearing on the other side of the truck.

“Because they have self-preservation instincts and do as they’re told. When you stop disappearing halfway through ops without telling me, I’ll call you Clint.”

“You drive a hard bargain, sir--and I’ll hold you to that one.”

“We have news.” Bobbi dumped an armful of HYDRA weapons at Sharon’s feet. “We got a call while you were carrying out the raid. They’ve found Tony Stark.”

“Is that why they sent you?”

“No, I just wanted to expand my collection, so I volunteered.” She picked up one of the guns, examined it carefully and seemed to decide that it was the one she wanted. “Fury wants you to try to get to Stark. ‘Try not to be too obvious’ were his exact words. I think he got you mixed up with Clint.”

“Hey, I can be subtle!”

“If it involves crawling around in the vents.” Romanoff climbed into the truck, sparing a split-second glance at Sam and Sharon (Sam had given into Sharon’s demands that he cut the bottom inch of her hair off). “People shooting at me have been more subtle than you are in close quarters.”

“What does she do with those?” Barton asked, watching Bobbi check the rest of the guns, putting each one to the side and occasionally handing one up to Sharon, Sam or Romanoff. The one she’d chosen for herself was propped against the back tyre of the truck, out of sight of any passing agents.

“We don’t know and we don’t ask.” Bobbi wasn’t the first person to set up a weapons stash outside work; Phil himself had enough weapons to make people ask questions. Bobbi’s were just slightly less legal and a little more dangerous. She’d ranked extraordinarily low on the tests to ascertain whether she was likely to go rogue or kill them all, so no one really minded very much, as long as she logged them with Phil or someone else.

He ran his finger over the edge of Claire Costello’s card and smiled.

 

 

Clint watched Coulson pull on the suit jacket and examine it in the mirror.

“How does it look?”

“Normal.” It was weird. Clint was so used to seeing him in his usual suits, the ones that were painfully expensive and were probably billed to the division, that seeing him in something off the rack, dredged from the back of his closet, was almost like seeing another person. “Why does Fury want you to dress down, anyway?”

Coulson pulled the sleeves of the suit jacket down until they were past his wrists. “This part usually works better when we don’t arouse suspicion the second they see us. We’re supposed to look normal, not look like we’re about the shut them down.” He looked Clint up and down. “Which is why you’re not coming.”

“I can look normal!” He was sure he had a few things that weren’t eye-catching in the thing that pretended to be a closet. The purple sunglasses would probably make normal people give him a second glance, but in a room of people who regularly saw Tony Stark? He’d be surprised if they blinked.

“Have you forgotten what happened to all of your suits?”

Clint thought about it for a minute. The first had been ruined when he’d had to go through the sewer that a wannabe-genius was using as an evil lair; the jacket of the second had been used to start a fire when he’d needed to smoke something out of a warehouse; the third one had been taken by HYDRA goons; the fourth had... Okay, he got the point.

“I don’t think we can justify a tenth suit, not after you used the last one to blindfold a golem.”

“You weren’t complaining when it stopped trying to kill you,” Clint said. And that had been a great idea--even if the golem had ended up trampling its creator. In Clint’s opinion, the guy had deserved it for planning to create his own army, especially since he’d only given it sight and touch before sending it out to kill people. “And it wasn’t the last one; the last one was used as a tourniquet when we took those junior agents on a field trip.”

“Training exercise,” Coulson corrected him, but with no real force. He’d never admit it, but Clint knew that he’d thought that it had been like babysitting a bunch of twelve year olds. They’d been completely clueless once Clint had started shooting arrows at them. One had managed to slice his leg open on a tree stump. Clint hadn’t even known that was possible.

 

 

Phil had dealt with a lot of strange things since he’d joined SHIELD. His latest job had involved a man in a metal suit, powered by an arc reactor in his chest, so it was safe to say that he knew strange, he’d experienced strange and he’d survived strange.

What none of the men in metal suits, arc reactors or that one time gas in a lab had started turning chemists into squids had prepared him for two agents and a complete stranger crashing through his window when he was in the middle of a date.

Phil withdrew his gun from where he’d hidden it under the table as Claire screamed and took a swing at Romanoff. She ducked and shot Claire a distinctly unimpressed look as she kicked the stranger in the gut.

“Sorry, sir,” Barton said breathlessly, flattening himself against the wall, his gun trained on the man who was still writhing in agony on the floor. “This is the only place we could think of to corner him. It’s not the best place, but it’s the only place.”

Romanoff cuffed him with a set of specially made cuffs – ability suppressing cuffs, wonderful – and sat back on her heels. She’d dyed her hair black since Phil had seen her last.

“Do you want me to wait outside?” Claire asked, staring at Romanoff with undisguised curiosity.

“No,” Phil said at the exact same time Romanoff said, “Yes,” and Barton started to say, “Hey, you must be—”

Claire just smiled at Phil and said, “I think I’ll wait outside.”

As soon as the door closed behind her, Phil turned to Romanoff and Barton.

“I hope the two of you have a very good reason for leading a criminal to my apartment in the middle of my only night off.”

“He’s an assassin,” Romanoff explained. She was brushed glass out of her hair, gathering it in one hand. “We think that he was being sent after agents and assets working for SHIELD. The agent who was killed last month? We think that he was in contact with this man a few days before he died.”

An agent who had been working on Project Lazarus. Well, that was just great. Phil sighed. His sister was right; he should have got a _normal_ job instead of taking up Fury’s father’s offer. A job with set hours and no trained assassins crashing through his window in the middle of his date.

“My car’s in the parking garage behind this building; we can use it to take him back to headquarters. I need to say goodbye to Claire before I leave, so I’ll meet you there.”

After dropping the glass into the bin, Romanoff pulled the assassin up by the handcuffs, not bothering to give him time to get his feet underneath himself, and tugged him out the door in a strange, hobbled way.

“So that’s the cellist,” Barton said, edging inside and leaning against the door jam and running his fingers through his hair, dislodging pieces of glass. There was a cut on his cheek that someone would have to make sure was seen to later on (most likely Phil himself, because Barton would never go to Medical unless he was unconscious when he was taken). “She seems nice.”

It was said with an undercurrent of hostility and Phil very carefully reminded himself that he liked Barton, that he didn’t want to restrict him to observation only operations for the next week.

Phil nodded, taking Claire’s jacket from the hook on the back of the door. “She is.” He just hoped that he hadn’t blown it—or that an assassin and two other SHIELD agents hadn’t blown it for him.

Surprisingly, Claire was in the hallway. Phil wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d taken one look at the three people who’d come crashing through his sitting room window and had ran in the opposite direction. After all, it wasn’t a common occurrence for anyone but a SHIELD agent to have anything like that happen in the middle of a date. In fact, it hadn’t even happened to Phil before. He could have lived without it ever happening.

“Oh, and I met Clint. He’s nice,” Claire smiled. She looked over her shoulder, saw Romanoff with her arms folded across her chest, and cleared her throat. “I should really be going.”

_Nice?_ It hadn’t seemed like either of them had found the other to be particularly _nice_ at all. In fact, Phil hadn’t seen so much thinly veiled hostility since he’d first met Romanoff—and at least she’d had a reason, having had one of Clint’s arrows aimed at her hours before and she’d known damn well that he’d been the one telling Clint to take the shot.

“Did he say something to her?” he asked Romanoff.

She pulled one of her knives out of the wall and wiped it on her sleeve, frowning at the slightly bent blade. “I think it was less what he said and more what she thought he was trying to do.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d lost him, but it was the first time it had happened when he was standing in his own house.

Phil decided that he was going to do the thing that was less likely to give him a migraine and ignore it all, then went to stop Clint from completely emptying his fridge before they left.

 

 

“You want to go after him?” Hill asked, finally looking up from her computer. “You do know that we sent him into an operation that only had a fifty percent chance of success, don’t’ you? The chances that he’s even alive are tiny, let alone that he’s functional enough to come back in one piece. This isn’t Budapest, it isn’t an op gone wrong. These people specialise in taking people apart; it’s why we didn’t send Romanoff.”

“I’ve read the file.” Dozens of times while he’d been waiting for Barton to check in, re-reading the page that detailed that particular check-in when he missed it. He’d missed almost two weeks of check-ins. Thirteen days, eight hours and change since anyone had received confirmation that he was alive. “Barton is one of our best agents.”

“So are you. Fury would kill me if he found out I let you trade one for the other.”

“There isn’t going to be a trade and, even if there was going to be, Fury never has to know.”

Hill’s expression shifted closer to conspiratorial than annoyed. “Are you suggesting that I lie to him?”

“I’m not suggesting anything.” If Hill didn’t report that he was gone, then he wouldn’t have to worry about permission from Fury—and he wouldn’t have to use one of the favours.

“Get Barton and get back here before I have to tell Fury where you’ve gone. If anything happens to you or him while you’re gone, it’s on you.”

“Agreed. And, Maria? Thank you.”

 

 

“Well?” Bobbi asked when Hill’s door clicked closed. She was sitting on the window ledge, fidgeting with one of her battle staves. “Did Hill give you permission?”

“She told me to find him and get back before she has to report that I’m missing,” Phil said, starting along the corridor. He didn’t need to look back to know that she was following him. Luckily, his office was just down the hall from Hill’s, which meant that he didn’t have to go very far to pick up his bag.

The bag in question was a holdall. It wasn’t particularly large or impressive, but it had been used for more operations that Phil could recall from memory alone. It was packed with some weapons, enough clothing to last a few days, basic medical supplied and a tracker so that SHIELD could find him if they needed to.

“Sam and Sharon are still attached to Project Lazarus and the Captain America investigation, and Romanoff is in Detroit on a covert op for Fury, so you’re going to be on your own until I get back. Sitwell has the clearance to give you access to most of my files.” He unzipped the bag and quickly ran through the laminated list that was on top of the contents, ticking off everything that was there. The medical supplies were a little low, but he could deal with that later. “You don’t need to edit anything, I just need you to access them every day at two in the morning so that the activity is logged and no one starts asking any questions. If anyone comes to my office, tell them that I’m busy and that you’re keeping any eye on things while I’m working—tell them that I’m working on something for Fury.”

“Got it. Access files at two in the morning – you’re buying the drinks for that one – and tell anyone who asks for you that you’re working for Fury. Out of the city or out of the country?”

“City.” Phil changed his shoes, switching them for a pair without the SHIELD chips hidden in the soles. “They’ll ask too many questions if I’m out of the country.”

“Coulson,” Bobbi said. Phil stopped but didn’t turn around. “Bring him back alive.”

“I’ll try.”

 

 

_People usually assumed that Phil had some sort of influence on Fury because they’d known each other for years, and Phil didn’t usually inform them otherwise. The truth was that he got as many boring, thankless jobs as everyone else, maybe even more, because Fury knew for sure that he could do them without somehow causing an international incident._

_So, when the file of someone who looked to be a petty thief landed on his desk, he wasn’t exactly surprised._

_Barton. There was another file that he had read with that surname, but it had been buried under paperwork regarding the still-ongoing search for Captain America and an anonymous, but ultimately empty, tip about the Winter Soldier. There wasn’t much in the file, other than a criminal record that mainly consisted of some minor assaults, breaking and entering and a few thefts. Nothing big, nothing dangerous. Nothing that should have got him on SHIELD’s radar._

_“Fury wants him dead,” Maria said, and that was a surprise. Barton was only in his late twenties. What could he have done to piss off people so much that SHIELD wanted him dead? “The problem is that no one, not even our contacts in the mercenary business can find him.”_

_That was not surprising. Barton was all over the map: New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Dallas, San Diego. He was never in one place for longer than a week, rarely the same place twice and days between him leaving one place and SHIELD spotting him in another._

_There wasn’t much in the file after a newspaper clipping about the deaths of his parents, and his last known address was from when he was a kid. There was the name of his brother, which must have been why he knew the name, but that was it. Barney Barton’s file, from what Phil remembered, was a single sheet of paper and a short criminal record. The crimes were more serious and had been going on for longer, but it was as interesting as his brother’s._

_The last known address was an orphanage. It had been years, but there was no missing persons report, so maybe he’d get lucky._

_“I’ll handle it, but you’ll have to take the gents while I’m working. I can’t leave them alone yet and Alvarez is still on medical leave,” Phil said, already mentally mapping out the fastest route to the city where the orphanage was. The fine details could be worked out when he got a map in front of him. Not when one of them still can’t hit a target to save his life._

_Maria sighed like she was expecting it. “I’ll take the agents if you buy the coffee when you get back. I know what those agents are like, Phil.”_

_Difficult. Desperate. Dangerous. The three Ds come up on a file, and Fury looked at it personally, and then passed it on to Phil. Barton didn’t tick those boxes though, although there wasn’t enough information on him to make an informed decision. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, and that was another reason that files landed across his desk: there was no way to know if they’d help or hinder SHIELD._

_He hadn’t had a wild card for a while, not since the preliminary research on Tony Stark (all two hundred and fifty pages of it) was placed in front of him by a particularly grim Fury._

_“There’s only one reason Fury would send this file to me.”_

_Maria didn’t confirm or deny it, but she took the files on his junior agents and left without complaining about them._

_Phil brought up SHIELD’s mapping programme and started to plot the route to the orphanage._

_He wondered how desperate Clint Barton was._

 

 

_We’re going to break your fingers one by one_ , and something in a language that Clint didn’t speak (but Natasha did, because he’d heard some of those words in relation to people they had needed information from, and those encounters never ended well). They usually ended up with a dead body in the nearest morgue and Coulson complaining about paperwork, ink smudged across his fingertips for days afterwards.

It was dark, too dark to see anything, even with the dirt coated light bulb at the other end of the room. There were other people there as well, one, two, three, and cold metal around his wrists and ankles, wood against his bare skin (they’d stripped him, when had they stripped him?)

How long had he been here? His head was swimming and the room smelled like blood and vomit; he could feel the cramps of hunger in his stomach, making him want to double over. They hadn’t fed him for…what? A day or two at least? Longer?

_crack_

It hurt, bright and sharp and cutting. The first thing Clint thought of when they asked the same question again ( _Where are the codes?_ in heavily accented English, and he’d never tell, would die before he told them anything) was ink on fingertips, not broken bones and blood on concrete floors.

_crack_

He didn’t know where the codes were. Codes weren’t his job. He watched people and shot people, had no use for the numbers.

They didn’t care. The world narrowed to the room, the stone floor beneath his feet, and the smell of burning flesh.

He was thirteen years old again, his eyes shut tight and stinging from the tears, fingers bloody and his muscles aching, but the tent was quiet and there was no one around. It was quiet and Clint didn’t scream, not even when he felt a needle prick his skin.

 

 

At an abandoned gas station, not far from where their (poor) intelligence said that Barton was being held, Phil stopped to gather the pieces together and let the car that had been tailing him for the last three hours catch up. It pulled in just down the road, hidden by the forest that threatened to take over the road in the near future.

SHIELD was at least eight hours out, but there was no time for him to wait for them to arrive: they’d already had Barton for over a week, they weren’t going to keep him alive for much longer, not when he’d be refusing to give them any information. Or at least any useful information. He remembered the tapes of the mock interrogations: the most recent one had consisted of Clint telling his ‘torturers’ about Buffy, and quoting one-liners when they’d asked questions.

“You’re supposed to be in Detroit,” he said when Romanoff reached him. Her hair was dark red this week; it suited her more than the black had. Judging from the crumpled clothes that smelled like smoke and blood, she’d gone right to the nearest airport when she got the message.

Romanoff ignored him and got into the passenger seat, throwing one of the bags onto the backseat. She helped herself to the second cup of gas station coffee.

“This is disgusting,” she said, downing most of it in one go.

He ignored that complaint; he heard it whenever she stole coffee that wasn’t from his private supply. “This isn’t your job. You’re his colleague and I’m his handler. I’m the one who has to get him back.”

“You aren’t here because you’re his handler, and I’m not here because we work together; we both know that. This stopped being about the job a long time ago.” Romanoff held out one of her guns, some strange offer of a compromise. “You didn’t kill him. He didn’t kill me.”

“You think he should have?”

“If our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t have hesitated, let alone let him live. I owe him and I always pay my debts.”

The message was clear: _We go together, or we go separately; either way, I’m still going._

Phil started the car without any further discussion.

 

 

To anyone who stumbled across the building, it looked to be completely deserted. It had been beautiful once, but that had been long before it had fallen into disrepair. One wing had collapsed years ago and was surrounded by scaffolding with weeds and plants growing around it, signs warning people to keep out nailed to every available surface. The roof was covered in moss dipped in the middle, threatening to cave in at any moment.

Phil picked his way up the cobblestone path, his gun drawn but pointed at the ground. There had been no response to any attempts to get the attention of anyone inside, which meant that they were either not there or they were preparing an attack.

“You get fifteen minutes.” Romanoff left her gun in her holster as she started down the corridor, pulling a knife from a sheath. It glinted in the water light coming through the dirty windows.

 

 

It wasn’t very difficult to find where they were keeping Cli--Barton. All Phil had to do was follow the ever-increasing number of security guards, past rooms of knives and guns, past a portable boom box that looked out of place, until he reached a cell. He checked his pockets, returning his gun to its holster when he realised that he was out of clips.

So much for being armed. He sighed. He had a piece of scrap metal in the pocket of his suit jacket, but brutal and bloody had never been his preferred way of killing. In fact, Phil preferred it when he didn’t have to kill people at all. It was usually better to injure them, because then they could still give you information.

However, someone going after someone he thought of as one of _his_ agents?

That changed things.

As soon as the door opened, Phil took aim at the man with the piece of metal, automatically accounting for the way the small bag he had slung over one shoulder shifted his balance. It hit the artery the first time, and Phil spared a second to feel sorry for that, before he was past the man and dropping to his knees beside Barton, cuffed to a chair and completely naked, sliding his fingers across his neck and searching for a pulse.

_Come on, not after you’ve jumped off buildings. You’re not dying in a basement, not after Budapest_. There it was; the fast and unsteady beat of Clint’s pulse under his fingers.

“Clint, can you hear me?”

“Coulson,” Clint muttered, licking his cracked lips and smiling faintly as Phil unlocked the cuffs around his wrists and ankles. His eyes were only half open, and he wasn’t focusing very well on anything, but it was better than him being unconscious. “Wondered when I’d see you... Seen all the others... Think they hurt them...” The next sound was almost a sob, dragged out of his, raw and painful. “Heard Sharon screaming... And Bobbi. You sure the Phantom Rider's dead?”

Hallucinations. Or maybe that was why there was a boom box. Phil ran his fingers gently across the cuts, avoiding the burns, and realised that at least half of them looked to be infected. He let  Clint lean against him, his head on his shoulder, his breath coming in harsh pants, only slowing with Phil rubbed his shoulder the way he had after the night at the concert hall.

First things first; get Clint dressed, find Romanoff and get out. He’d just managed to get Clint into the sweatpants and loose cotton t-shirt when Romanoff walked through the door, the knife gone and a gun in her hand instead. There were traces of blood spatter across her face and hands.

“You gave me fifteen minutes,” Phil said as Romanoff worked her arm around Clint in a way that avoided as many of the cuts, bruises and burns as possible. Blood was beginning to seep through the t-shirt in place, some of the cuts opening whenever they moved him.

“You were being too slow for me. Are we going to the safe house or an extraction point?”

“Safe house. We can’t risk an extraction right now.” Clint slumped to the side, consciousness fading, his head coming to rest on Phil’s shoulder, his breath hot and unsteady against Phil’s neck. He was muttering something under his breath, but Phil couldn’t quite make it out. Begging? “On the count of three?”

 

 

The safe house was far enough away from the building where Clint had been held that it was unlikely that any survivors would be able to find them—if they survived long enough to make it out of the building. Between them, Phil was sure that he and Romanoff had ensured that no one who made it out would be in any fit state to talk. It was hard to talk with your throat cut, if you lived at all.

The safe house itself was small, with one large bed, a kitchenette and a bathroom with an old bathtub in it. It looked exactly like the one that was in the SHIELD handbook, like the majority of the safe houses.

“What do you need?” Romanoff asked as Phil filled the bathtub, swiping his fingers under the tap to make sure that the water didn’t get too hot. They had to get Clint cleaned up, prevent the infections from getting any worse, and start to treat whatever had set in. It didn’t fit any of the most serious infections Phil had seen – he pushed away the memory of a junior agent crying for her mother while another tried to stop her from shaking – which meant that it was one of the kinds he’d been taught how to treat before Portland. He'd learned how to treat the worse ones after, but it had been far too late.

“Heavy duty painkillers, burn ointments, antibiotics, bandages. I’ve got some bandages in the first aid kit, but they’re not going to be enough, not after what they’ve done.” They’d passed a hospital on the way, and Phil knew that Romanoff had posed as a nurse and snuck into a hospital at least once before.

“I won’t be long,” she said, stayed just long enough to help Phil get Clint into the tub, and she was gone, climbing out the window and down the fire escape, hardly making a sound.

“Just a flesh wound,” Clint slurred and made a sound that could have be a laugh, if it hadn’t suffocated by blood and pain. He trailed his fingers across the surface of the water, leaning against the side of the tub. “Hurts, though.”

He was right, though, Phil realised as he carefully ran the washcloth over each injury. The wounds were precise, but none of them were lethal: they’d all been carefully done to inflict maximum pain with minimal damage. Some of them wouldn’t even scar. There were burns from his ankles to halfway up his thighs, across his back and arms. The scar that Phil had always suspected was from a belt had been cut open.

The only people Phil disliked more than assassins working for the wrong side were the torturers.

Assassins could come from all walks of life, but it took a very cruel person to be willing to torture someone slowly, to only want to inflict pain on them with no intention of kill them until they were done.

When he was finished, he helped Clint to his feet and wrapped him in as many towels as he could. The safe house wasn’t used very often, hence the lack of decent medical supplies, but it was well-stocked with towels and clean sheets.

“I took as much as I could carry without arousing suspicion,” Romanoff said as she climbed in the window. She upended the bag she was holding, and let the tubes of cream, bottles of tablets and the occasional syringe full of the more high-end painkillers fall onto the bed beside Clint. Clint hardly stirred, opening his eyes just long enough to smile weakly at Romanoff, before he closed them again.

He wasn’t sure if Clint was unconscious, but it was definitely easier to clean him up when he wasn’t trying to talk to them. Clint liked to talk whenever he was being forced into any sort of medical treatment, something Phil had discovered when they’d been waiting for Clint’s first hearing aid to be developed and Clint had been beside him for almost three days straight, talking about everything and anything that crossed his mind. It would have been annoying if there hadn’t been something heart-breaking about his desperate impulse to keep Phil’s attention, to keep himself occupied.

Clint whimpered, digging his fingers into Phil’s leg when he cleaned one of the worst burns. Phil froze, unsure of what to do, before he let his hand settle at the back of Clint’s head, slowly stroking his hair. It wasn’t quite the way he’d rubbed Clint’s arm to make him relax the last time he’d had to treat a burn, but it did the trick.

 

 

Someone was stroking his hair. Clint couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done that--if anyone had ever done that. It was nice, so he pushed closer to the fingers and the person stilled for a moment before they started again, the same slow slide of his fingers through his hair.

He knew those hands. He’d felt those hands on his arms, on his neck, on his face when Coulson was checking him for a concussion after he’d cracked his head off a pipe in an abandoned warehouse.

He opened his eyes just enough to see Coulson sitting beside him, a first aid kit on his lap. He couldn’t see Natasha at his back, but he could feel her hands on him, knew the way that she cleaned wounds from the times Coulson hadn’t been around to force him to go to Medical.

"Hey," Clint muttered, trying to shake off the fuzziness from the infection and medication, "at least it's not a rooftop."

 

 

“You were in the Red Room,” Phil said when he was sure that Clint was asleep. His hand was aching and it was probably going to hurt for a few hours.

It was the closest thing to laugh that Phil had ever heard from Romanoff, other than the evening after they’d all almost died in Budapest, but the amusement wasn’t genuine.

“You never get out of the Red Room.”

“You did.” She had and she hadn’t.

“It’s not that simple.”

No, it never was. Simple was an assignment where someone put a bullet in an assassin’s head and there were no collapsing buildings or surprise back-up to almost kill them all. Simple was the initial assignment, but no one ever bothered to look at everything radiating out from the centre, a thousand tiny fractures that could completely change the situation or bring it all crashing down around them.

“If it was any other day, I would have told him to take the shot and kill you where you stood,” Phil said.

Clint stirred slightly, curling up and shifting closer to him, his fingers digging into his wrist. There would be bruises there tomorrow, but he’d worry about them tomorrow. Phil carded his fingers through Clint’s hair again, feeling him relax almost immediately. Natasha watched them curiously.

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. I trusted his judgement and he came through.”

"That's not the only reason."

"They say the Red Room was still in operation until a few years ago. That it was taken down from the inside, by one of their own from a long time ago."

"You should know better than to listen to rumours, Coulson." Natasha picked up one of her guns. “I’ll take the first watch. I’ll wake you up in three hours.”

 

 

Clint woke up in a warm bed with a duvet tucked around him, feeling like half his brain had been replaced with cotton candy and everything else had gone ten rounds with Natasha and Bobbi.

_Ow_. He slowly forced himself up into a sitting position, wincing when one of the bandages tugged at the wound.

_It smelled like a hospital, someone poking and prodding at the cuts and burns like they didn’t know that it hurt._

_He woke up screaming, feeling like he was five years old and faced with the inevitability of his father’s fists or belt._

_Someone was usually sitting beside him. They held his hand a lot and said things, stupid things about how it was going to be okay, how he was safe, how he was at SHIELD and no one could get near him. That was a lie. Clint had thought he’d been safe plenty of times, but he never had._

_Coulson talking to Matthews, drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair he was sitting in. Clint knew that beat. It was the same as the one in the song he used to piss off Sitwell._

_“My apartment has the same security system as SHIELD does. He’ll be safer there and any treatment won’t be interrupted by him suffering traumatic flashbacks.”_

_Oh._ Clint crept across the room—or he tried to. It was hard to creep when your feet felt like you’d been walking over hot coals. It was more of a slow limp, but he made it to the door and opened it.

Wherever he was, it was someone’s home, all right. There were photographs lining the hall wall. Family photographs. A lot of them were the standard parents-and-kids-grinning-at-the-camera fare, but there were others, older ones, that made him stop and stare. Coulson and a woman who looked just similar enough to him that Clint instinctively knew that she was his sister. They had the same eyes. The two of them with a woman who had to be their mother, who had one arm around each of her children. More family photos, but those were older. Two small children with their mother and a man who was probably their father. Coulson and a man who looked a hell of a lot like Fury back when he had both eyes (or at least Clint assumed so; he’d never seen Fury with both eyes), holding glasses up to whoever was taking the photograph.

In the very middle was a photograph that looked like it could have been older than the people in the other photographs.

It was a shot of a lot of people, but right in the middle was a group. A group Clint knew from all the times he’d lain on the couch in Coulson’s office, listening to Sam and Sharon bring him up to date on anything he could have possibly missed about the Captain America investigation. They’d usually tacked photos up on the walls, groups of people who were associated with Captain America.

The Howling Commandos and Captain America.

“Clint?” Coulson was standing beside him and Clint registered the sound of a woman talking to Natasha. He followed Clint’s gaze, smiling when he saw the photograph Clint had been staring at. “That’s my father.”

“He knew Captain America.”

“Captain America saved his life, and those of a lot of other men. Everyone else had given up on them by then.” Phil's smile was fond, but sad. "He died a few years ago, but he never believed that Captain America was dead."

The famous 107th, rescued by Captain America. Joseph Coulson. Of course. Why hadn’t he made the connection earlier? Coulson had once mentioned that he’d known someone who knew Captain America, and that they’d never believed for a moment that Captain America was dead. Clint remembered that he’d made some vague noises about them probably being wrong, because who could survive that?

“That’s really cool,” Clint said, for the sheer lack of anything else to say. What was he supposed to say? Somehow he doubted that _hey, it’s a good thing Captain America saved them, or you wouldn’t have been born_ would go down well. He wondered what it had been like for Coulson to grow up having someone with that sort  of faith around him, a positive sort of faith instead of the faith that a mess would lead to a slap, and that alcohol always led to bruises and blood being spilled.

“Natasha’s in the living room,” Coulson said and Clint didn’t realise that he’d called her Natasha instead of Romanoff until he was halfway down the hall. Coulson had disappeared, either into the bedroom – probably his own bedroom – or into the kitchen.

One of the doors was partially open to reveal another bedroom, the one next to it seemed like it was in the right place to be a bathroom, so Clint took a chance with the one opposite it and found himself face to face with the business end of a nine mil.

“If you’re a burglar, you’re a terrible one,” the woman at the other end of the gun said, cocking her head to one side. “Phil, please tell me that you never trained this one for anything covert; he sounds like a herd of elephants.”

“He was tortured last week, Amanda, leave him alone,” Phil said, nudging Clint forward, managing not to hit any of the cuts or bruises.

“I’d have left you all alone if you’d gone home like you said you would. But _no_ , you broke your promise and mom sent me up here to make sure that you weren’t missing any meals.” She held up a muffin—and, wow, those things were massive. Clint had never seen anything that big outside those fancy bakeries he’d stared into whenever he and Barney had been desperate to find something to eat. Those muffins wouldn’t have stayed in a bakery long enough to be thrown out because they were stale. “Although what a muffin has to do with missing meals, I have no idea. I think she just wanted to feed you up. And you little group of…” Amanda waved her hand. “Whatever they are. Spies? Agents? Does he have a name for you?”

“The junior agents call his office The Aviary. I think that makes us his flock,” Natasha said.

Phil shot her a look that Clint had never seen on his face before; one of the ones that said _you’re not helping, stop talking to my sister, you might be an assassin but I will kill you if you enable my sister_. Natasha just smiled at him. It wasn't terrifying like it would have been, but it was still pretty damn creepy. They'd be one hell of a team if they ever teamed up for anything.

Phil pushed a blanket into Clint’s hands and motioned towards the couch, where Sam and Bobbi were talking.

“I’m just saying that I’d rather have my life saved by SHIELD tech or Stark tech or whatever Project Lazarus is than die or spend the rest of my life in a coma.” Bobbi had a glass of what looked like iced tea in one hand and a muffin the size of her fist on a plate on her lap. Sam was sitting at the other end of the couch, leaning back against the arm of the couch, his own muffin in one hand and a can of beer in the other.

“Did you see what happened to the last guy they put through Project Lazarus? He killed someone before they managed to take him down!”

“But if you knew that wouldn’t happen?”

“We can’t know it won’t happen. Come on, Bobbi, you work along the hall from the medical experimentation labs; you’ve seen some of the things that come out of there. If there’s any chance of something like that happening, I wouldn’t do it.”

“Are you still arguing about that?” Sharon nudged Bobbi along and sat down with her own plate. “Clint, how are you feeling?”

“Sore. Confused.” He’d passed out in a safe house on the other side of the country and woken up surrounded by something like a family.

Family wasn't something Clint knew a lot about. Sure, he knew the basics: they fed you, clothed you, put a roof over your head and, if they were feeling particularly kind, they didn't beat you, starve you, take it away or ask you to pay for it in some way.

His version of family was the faded outline of a Paint By Numbers that was missing the numbers. It was missing (half the time) a sibling who could coax him into agreeing to do the dishes and then throw him a box of chocolates half an hour later; it was missing the mother who taught him to bake giant muffins before he was old enough to see over the kitchen counter (a story that was happily relayed to them by Amanda while Phil threatened to never speak to her again); it was missing a father who had taught him to shoot and that heroes were real if you knew where to find them, if you cared enough to look.

Coulson’s family sounded like something out of one of the books some of the other kids at the orphanage had kept hidden under their beds. Open arms and _make sure you call me when you arrive so I know that you’re okay_ and more homemade food than anyone could eat alone.

Clint had never bothered to keep any of those books, but he’d read a few in the middle of the night, by the light in the bathroom, where Barney couldn’t laugh at him (because they’d already had a mom and dad, and they’d been awful, so it was stupid for Clint to want more). Overall, Clint guessed that his family had pretty much sucked overall. His dad had beat them, his mom hadn’t even tried to stop him and his brother had abandoned him.

 

 

Later on, after Amanda had left (telling Phil that if he didn’t go home for Christmas, she was going to call someone called Marcus and start playing dirty), and Bobbi, Sharon, Sam and Natasha had eventually forced themselves to move from the living room and had returned to their quarters at headquarters, Clint went to bed.

Well, he went to bed and tried to get to sleep. It was mostly lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling. After two hours, Clint gave up and eased himself up, feeling his back protest. He limped down the hall, being careful to avoid the squeaky floorboards and pushed the living room door open. Maybe there would be something decent on TV that he could watch at a low volume or something.

Phil looked up and muted the TV before Clint had a chance to back out of the room, unsure of his welcome. He was pretty sure he was watching Supernanny.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked. “I can’t blame you; there was enough sugar in that food to keep an elephant up all night.”

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Clint muttered. “Guess that’s pretty pointless now.”

“I can sleep through anything that isn’t an alarm; don’t worry.” He patted other end of the couch. “You don’t have to stand there all night.”

Clint stepped across the brightly coloured rug Amanda had unrolled (despite her brother’s protests) and lowered himself onto the couch, one arm curled around his sore ribs—all the muffins and cookies in the world couldn’t help with bruised ribs, but he’d done more with much worse. He settled down at the opposite end from Phil, stretching out and tucking his toes under Phil’s thigh. Phil smiled faintly before he switched the sound back on and Clint closed his eyes, not really listening to what was definitely Supernanny.

The house was still quiet, and it made Clint think of lazy mornings with someone who wanted you for more than one night, complaining about reports and junior agents who kept trying to do jobs they weren’t suited for or qualified for while they ate breakfast, and bad coffee that still got drank because, for all his taste in suits, Phil liked coffee that tasted like it had fished out of an abandoned petrochemical plant.  Clint wondered if he was still dating  Claire--and there was that feeling again, that sudden flare of emotion, but now Clint recognised it as jealousy. He wanted to be the one having dinner (homemade; Clint couldn't remember the last time he'd had homemade food) at Coulson's apartment, or having hushed conversations before leaving for work.

He hadn’t been so fucked since Phil shot him in the leg.

 

 

Clint sat on the couch, wearing loose sweatpants that slipped down an inch or so whenever he moved, and occasionally opened his eyes to mutter insults at the parents on the show. Phil just nodded when Clint looked to him for agreement and didn't complain when Clint put his feet in his lap.

Natasha, having returned at some point in the early hours of the morning to find them both asleep on the couch, muttered something in Russian that made Phil remind himself to brush up on his Russian. There was no way she'd said what he thought she had.


	5. Chapter 5

v. _**Things happen all the time, things happen every minute / that have nothing to do with us**_

__

If there was one thing Clint hated more than anything, it was the amount of sitting around that he had to do before he got to take a shot. He was sitting on a small wall on the edge of a building, watching for who knew what. Apparently a big weapons deal was supposed to be taking place across the street, but Clint wasn’t convinced. He’d seen more life in the SHIELD morgue—and that had been before Project Lazarus.

“Anything?” one of the junior agents asked.

“No. Stay off the channel unless something happens,” was Phil’s response and Clint sniggered. He’d been surprised that Phil had agreed to bring along a team of junior agents; his avoidance of working with them was notorious. He hadn’t even been able to bring Natasha along because she was off working for Stark. “Hawkeye, do you see anything?”

“No, sir, nothing but a drunk homeless guy and some foxes. Why are there foxes in the middle of the city?”

“Falcon?”

Clint watched Sam’s silhouette pass over the block.

“Nothing so far, but I think—no!”

Sam didn’t just drop a few inches; he _fell_. Clint heard a junior agent scream as Sam disappeared into the shadows, Sharon and Coulson both yelling for a report and Bobbi demanding that the junior agents shut up before she put her staves somewhere very unpleasant.

Clint hit the ground, cursing when he felt the hearing aid and comm shift slightly. Damn things hadn’t fit right since he’d been tortured. He flicked through the comm channels, hearing each individual piece before trying Sam’s, which was nothing but silence.

“Falcon’s down!” Sharon sounded like she had just run all the way up the stairs of her perch.. Maybe she had. In the background, Clint could just make out someone shouting for back-up before he switched back onto the team comm and all hell broke loose. “I repeat; Falcon is down!”

“Does anyone have a visual?” Coulson’s voice cut right through the chaos. “I need eyes on Falcon and the target. The first person with eyes on the target is to take a kill shot, do you understand?”

“Negative, sir, we’ve been ordered to bring the target in alive.”

“The target’s life isn’t worth that of an agent! Barton, get down and stay down; it looks like the shot came from somewhere behind you,” Phil shouted and Clint winced, sinking closer to the ground. Stay low, don’t be seen, don’t get shot, get out alive. It sounded a lot easier than it was. “If you see the target, you’re to take a kill shot and, if you don’t, you’ll be out of SHIELD faster than you can shoot, do you all understand?”

The junior agents all went silent, muttering their agreements, and allowing it all to settle into a strained silence. Clint could feel his heart starting to pound. Where was Sam? Where was the target? How many were there?

“This is Mockingbird, I’ve reached the projectile and—oh my God.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an arrow. Sam was hit with an arrow!”

“What?” Clint shouted. Arrows were _his_ specialty. He’d never met anyone else who used arrows to injure or kill people. In fact, the only person he’d ever known to have anything near his level of skill with a bow was—

The arrow came out of nowhere, ripping across his arm. The bow fell from his hands as he drew back, away from the edge of the building, knowing that it was pointless. The arrow hadn’t come from in front of him; it had come from behind him, which meant—

Clint rolled over and looked out from behind the wall. He knew the man who was standing at the other side of the building It wasn’t Trick Shot, couldn’t possibly be Trick Shot, which meant that it was the only other person Clint knew had a problem with him, would be willing to hurt others and knew Trick Shot well enough to have him train them.

“Barney…” he whispered.

“Hey, little brother.” Barney jumped down from the top of the wall. “Long time no see. I’m surprised you didn’t visit me in jail. Then again, you were too busy playing cops and robbers with them, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.” Clint slid his hand across the ground, grateful that Barney’s view was blocked by the wall. “Yeah, I was.” His fingers closed around his bow and he brought it up and around, nocking an arrow as he did so. “Put it down, Barney. Now.”

“Come on. Remember the good times?” Barney hit the ground and rolled behind the wall on the other side of the building. Fuck. Clint _really_ wished SHIELD had taken the time to get rid of the hiding places he hadn’t wanted to use.

“Good times?” Clint shouted. The arrow missed Barney by inches. “You mean when you let the Swordsman beat me up and get away?” It missed him by centimetres. “Or when you ran off with Trick Shot after he pinned me to a tree with two arrows?” It caught the edge of his sleeve and he stumbled. “Or everything in between? There weren’t any good times, Barney. I was just too much of a kid to notice. You abandoned me years ago.”

It wasn't just anger at Barney hurting Sam, it was everything. Every time Barney had abandoned him or hurt him, or even just ignored him, when he'd shown that he was just like their parents, that he was either going to hurt Clint or ignore him.

Barney was backed into a corner now—literally. He was pressed up against the wall of what Clint thought housed an old water tower.

“I got a job to do, kid. Don’t be an idiot. It wasn’t anything personal.”

“Your job might’ve killed one of my friends. That’s personal.”

“Then you’re part of the job as well.” Barney lunged, his bow connecting with Clint’s nose hard enough that he heard a small _crunch_. He staggered backwards, caught off guard by the bow and Barney’s weight, and fell to the ground.

The earpiece and hearing aid, already loose from hitting the ground earlier, were both easily dislodged. The fell to the ground and bounced a few feet, just far enough.

Barney’s foot came down on the earpiece and the hearing aid, crushing them both. Clint closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He wasn’t just fucked. He was super fucked. Fucked was a nice idea compared to how it was going to end for him.

_A man walks into a bar._

Clint wiped the blood away from his mouth and twisted in Barney’s grip, just far enough that he could look his brother.

_A man walks into a bar_.

“You know what?” he coughed, spitting as much of the blood out as he could. “Dad would be so proud of you, Barney. You’ve turned into just as much of a bastard as he was.”

_The punch line is that he doesn’t walk out_ , Clint realised.

Barney punched him and Clint felt his teeth rattle as his head smacked off the concrete roof, blood wetting the back of his head and running from his nose. He held up his bow, squinting across the roof to watch Barney run, took the shot.

The arrow went wide, hitting the wall several feet to Barney’s right instead. Clint didn’t even try to grab another one; he just slumped down until his forehead was touching the concrete and closed his eyes, ignoring the way they burned.

 

 

As soon as he was sure that Sam was okay (aside from a sprained wrist and some bruises he’d tried to deny having, he was), Phil left Bobbi and Sharon in charge of the junior agents and headed for the roof Clint had been on. He’d managed to catch enough of the fight to recognise who Clint had been fighting.

Clint was sitting at the top of the fire escape, hunched over with his head in his hands. There was a small pile of bloody gauze on the ground between his knees, most likely left by one of the people who had tried to treat him before giving up and leaving him to do it himself. A needle and spool of threat that Phil recognised from Clint’s makeshift first aid kit was on top of the gauze.

“I missed,” Clint said without looking up, “I never miss.”

Phil sat down next to him and switched off his comm. They could survive without him for a few minutes. Bobbi and Sharon were doing a good job of terrifying the junior agents into submission.

“You didn’t miss, you just couldn’t bring yourself to kill him.” He’d have to clean and stitch up the wounds on Clint’s arms, but it could wait, as could the inevitable debriefing. Phil put the blanket around Clint’s shoulders, pressing the edges into his hands to make sure that it didn’t slip right off again, and busied himself with his phone, checking on the other agents. He ignored the way that Clint’s shoulders shook and how he couldn’t quite muffle every sob.


	6. Chapter 6

vi. _**And no one can ever figure out what you want, / and you won’t tell them**_

__

_Clint wondered if this was what dying felt like. It definitely hurt enough to be dying. The knowledge that, assoon as the people following him caught up with him, he was going to die._

_If he was lucky, maybe it wouldn’t hurt too much? Maybe they’d be kind enough to make it quick, or would they interrogate and torture him for information before they decided that the information wasn’t good enough and just finished him off?_

_Was this how the people he’d killed had felt? The men and women he’d killed for money, not because it was his legitimate job? Had they been able to feel that he was watching them, that they were going to die any minute?_

_If it was, then Clint was sorry, he was so sorry and he was so tired. It was like everything around him was pushing him further down, trying to crush him under the weight of everything he’d done._

_He ran his fingers over the bow one last time. It hadn’t been Clint’s first, but it had been the first one he’d designed and built himself, the product of almost a year of trial and error._

_A dead man didn’t need a bow._

 

 

**Year Five**

 

Phil was sitting at one of the metal tables that had been turned into a makeshift desk, reports spread across its surface and a pile of broken pens in an empty mug that was balanced precariously on the edge. There was a little fern in a green pot sitting on the tiny window ledge next to a mug full of pens that didn’t look broken. Another one for Sharon to move whenever she used Phil’s office.

Clint could hear Darcy talking to Jane outside, telling her that SHIELD wanted to recruit her, and the pay was _way_ better than anything else she’d ever been offered or had seen anyone else being offered, _and_ they’d let her complete her college course before she switched to full-time.

“You’re going to offer her a job?” he asked. It sounded like a terrible idea. She was nice and all, but she wasn’t really the kind of person SHIELD usually employed. She was too... normal. There was no real connection to SHIELD, no special training or abilities. Darcy was just someone who had ended up in the middle of a mess that had turned out to be a huge mess being watched by SHIELD.

Coulson switched his pen out for one of the ones in the mug without so much as ruffling the leaves of the fern. “There are no other options. She’s involved in this now, whether she wants to be, or not. If we don’t recruit her, then someone else will or they’ll kill her while attempting to do so.”

That was the good thing about mainly working in the field: Clint didn’t spend very much of his time with other SHIELD agents unless he was working with them or shooting them. It was usually a good thing, unless he was restless.

“What happens to them if they don’t agree to work for us?”

Phil paused halfway through signing one of the reports. “We can’t protect them, and they’re usually killed within a year. Doctor Foster is already looking over a contract, as is Doctor Selvig.”

“Fury’s still playing with that thing Stark found when he was looking for Captain America, isn’t he?” Clint hadn’t seen it himself, but Bobbi had been working in the lab when it had been brought in one day, and she’d asked to be switched back to field work while it was there.

_”I didn’t like the way I felt when it was there. I’ve seen a lot of things because R &D’s so close, but that? That’s not from our world and I don’t trust it.”_

“Would you trust a person?”

“That’s different. If you see it, Clint, you’ll understand. There’s something wrong _about it._

“I can’t confirm or deny that.”

Clint snorted. “You’re not supposed to confirm or deny half the stuff you tell me.”

He hunkered down under the little window, his bow propped against the wall beside him, and closed his eyes. The sound of Coulson typing was soothing after days of agents shouting orders and questions.

Why couldn’t they just ask like normal people? Nothing had even been blowing up at the time. The ones who’d been working for SHIELD for years, he could understand them yelling; they’d probably been rendered half deaf or had their brains scrambled by explosions (Clint resisted the urge to pick at the new hearing aid; this one fitted right, but it felt weird) but there was no reason for the new agents to scream when he was right next to them.

“Stop complaining.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I’ve worked with you for long enough that I can tell when you’re complaining. If you want something to complain about, you can get started on the...” he checked something on the dry erase noticeboard that was propped up against the wall. “Thirty three forms you have to fill in relating to the op you worked on with Agent McKay. I am never sending you on an op with him as your handler ever again.”

“Good. He’s an asshole.” An asshole who didn’t chase up paperwork. Clint held up his hand for the wad of paperwork. He knew that Coulson would have them; he _always_ had them. He probably had secret compartments built into his suit jackets to hide the forms in. There was no other reason to have a forms relating to three different types of toxic sludge with you on a surveillance operation (even if they did turn out to be really useful).

He stole a purple sparkly gel pen from the mug (his, probably left in Coulson’s car or office at some point) and set about filling out the first form.

 

 

_The wall was lined with photographs of Barton, arranged in chronological order so that they showed him changing from a baby in a faded family photo, to a small child sitting beside his brother in a photo that had been taken in the grounds of the orphanage, to a teenager holding a bow and grinning because he already knew he’d make the shot._

_“They’re recommending putting a kill order on him,” Sitwell said._

_Phil just stared at him for a moment before he remembered that it had been years since Barton had been the kid in the photographs. He was a grown man now, an adult with a dangerous skill set. Of course people wanted him dead: people like him were likely to be too dangerous if they worked for the wrong people, and Barton had already been seen in the company of enough criminals to make them wary. Barney Barton, Trick Shot and the Swordsman had just been the beginning of a list that was growing longer by the day. Natalia Romanova was one of the most dangerous people SHIELD had a file on and Barton was the only person who had spent so long with her - a month - and lived to tell the tale._

_He'd spent too long looking through old photographs of a sad looking child with bruises standing out starkly against his skin. Getting emotionally involved was never a good thing; it always led to disaster, but Phil couldn’t shake the feeling that Barton wasn’t someone they wanted to put a kill order on._

_“He’s never hurt anyone, unless you count pinning his own brother to the wall with an arrow,” he said. “In fact, he goes out of his way to avoid hurting people. The only reason we have his prints on file is because he was arrested when he stopped his partner from mugging someone.” After they’d robbed a store, but Phil had seen twenty-five year-olds with no money, no home and no one to turn to do a lot worse than rob a store._

_Sitwell plucked one of the photos from the board, the edges worn from the number of times Phil had examined it. It was one of the more recent ones, with Barton sitting on the edge of a bed in a cheap motel. He’d stayed there for two days, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that he looked tired in a way that he hadn’t before, not even in the blurry photographs from a police report after someone had broken both of his legs and left him for dead._

_Phil still had a lot of favours owed to him, and most of them were from Fury--they’d agreed shortly after joining SHIELD that no longer being called Marcus Johnson didn’t mean that the slate was wiped clean. Fury was as unwilling to be in debt to people as Marcus had been. A life would be a fitting exchange, given the number of times Phil had saved his._

_“What are you doing?” Sitwell asked as Phil removed his gun from his desk and checked which agents were available for any unplanned operations._

_Sam and Sharon were both busy, but there were enough capable agents who Phil knew well enough to trust them to think before they shot someone. He’d prohibit them from using lethal force and attempt to make sure that he’d be the only person to take any shots._

_“I’m going to bring Barton in.”_

 

_The hotel room wasn’t the best place Phil had found someone hiding out, but it wasn’t the worst. It was small and sparse, the wallpaper faded with age and an odd stain on one wall, but it was clean enough._

_He dipped the tip of one finger into a mug of coffee. Still warm, but not hot. He’d left a battered case with a bow inside it, half hidden under the bed._

_There was no brand on the bow, nothing to point to a specific manufacturer, but there were three tiny letters carved into the grip. They was small enough that they wouldn’t cause any problems with Barton’s grip, but just large enough that, when Phil ran his fingers across the wood, he could feel them._

_CFB_

_It hadn’t come from a manufacturer at all. It had been handmade by Barton himself. It wasn’t something that would have been left behind if he had any choice._

_If he expected to get out of this alive._

_Phil carefully placed the bow back in its case and locked it up._

_“Sir, we’ve got a possible sighting,” Morse said, one hand pressed to her ear, the other sliding through street maps until she found what she was looking for. “It’s not very far from here.”_

_Phil activated his own comm. “Okay, this is a direct order to use minimum force when apprehending Barton. We want him alive and as unharmed as is possible. If I see anyone taking the safety off their weapon, R &D will be using them as their guinea pig for at least the next month. Am I clear?”_

_A slightly delayed chorus of, “Yes, sir,” followed._

_Phil made sure that he took the bow with him when he left._

 

 

Clint was usually the first person to admit that he didn’t have very many hobbies outside of work. In fact, he was pretty sure he and Phil were the ones who were told that they needed to get a life that wasn’t connected with their jobs. That was easier said than done: Clint’s thing with Bobbi had disappeared after a while, and Clint hadn’t heard anything about the cellist for a while. He wondered if Phil was single again or if he was just hoping to avoid another interrupted date.

The closest thing Clint had to a hobby was hiding out in the ceilings or vents and watching new people being shown around. Darcy Lewis was particularly hilarious. She’d flirted with a rather caught off guard Sam, pissed off a biologist by mentioning that she was friends with a physicist and a conversation about guns had almost taken an unfortunate turn before Phil had steered it back to the right track. That hadn't even included her run-in with Pym...

Clint was never going to forgive him for that. He’d have loved to hear how that conversation would have went. Darcy seemed like the type to say,  _Sorry I almost stepped on you, but what were you doing down there?_

“Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum?” Darcy asked and Clint was really glad that he was out of sight, because he had to shove his hand halfway into his mouth to keep from laughing at that. There was only one reason someone would make a pirate reference in SHIELD headquarters and a quick look confirmed it.

Phil sounded exasperated when he said, “Ms Lewis, this is Director Fury.”

“Oh.”

“Get out of the damn ceiling Barton, before you become a janitor instead of an agent and I send you up there to clean every ceiling and vent in the building,” Fury said without looking up.

“Going, sir.”

 

 

“Just throw it!” Clint shouted down from the highest point of the gym. He could see Darcy rolling the ball back and forth in her hands and, really, she wasn’t his first choice to liven up target practice – joint first were Natasha and Bobbi, the second were Phil and Sam – but she was still new enough and talked to Phil enough that the other junior agents were a bit scared of her. The downside was that she wasn’t too sure about half the training equipment around there. She rolled the ball to her elbow once – Clint made a note to mention that little trick to Coulson – and he tensed. He could feel the tension thrumming through his body, a constant beat that drowned out everything around him.

He moved closer to the edge, bow drawn; the muscles in his arm twitching slightly from the length of time he’d been holding the position. It was good practice for lying in wait, but bad for everything else. He wanted to take a shot, shoot something before it all got too much. “Come on, hurry up!”

Darcy threw the ball as hard as she could. It bounced off one wall and split into about a dozen smaller ones, tiny fast and potentially dangerous. She shrieked and rolled under one of the huge benches off to the side.

“I’m going to kill Sanders!”

_Oh, shit._ Clint dropped the last couple of feet, landing in a crouch just in time to see Bobbi walk in. She was dressed in her field outfit, but had an open lab coat on over it.

“Those are still in the experimental stages,” she said, alternating between glaring at some sheepish looking lab techs and trying to stare Clint down. Clint would rather die than admit it, but it was working. He wondered if Natasha would come along and bail him out before Bobbi killed him. “Sanders should never have let you have them; the last person who tested them had to be treated for burns to his hands, arms and face.”

Darcy let out a horrified little yelp, rubbing her hands on her jeans as she crawled out from under her bench. Bobbi immediately checked her hands, pulling her fingers apart to make sure that there was no damage.

“I thought you were a biologist before you joined SHIELD? Why are you working in R&D?” It wouldn’t have been the first time someone’s personnel file had been wrong, but he was sure he’d read a paper she’d written during college. Biochemistry, maybe?

“We’ve been short-handed since the incident with the exploding arrows.” At Clint’s questioning look, Bobbi sighed. “They exploded without being activated. Two people quit and a third is being treated for burns to their hands. Until they can blackmail someone into joining SHIELD, I’m pulling double duty in the field and lab, along with the only other agent with a relevant degree. He’s a microbiologist.”

“Sounds fun.” Working in a lab when you weren’t in the field sounded a lot more interesting than sitting around for days or weeks on end, hoping that SHIELD needed someone killed or injured so that you could just _do_ something, anything.

He’d even considered talking to Phil about what had happened in the safe house after Clint had almost been tortured and killed, but he’d chickened out every single time. The closest he’d managed to get had been _remember the safe house?_ before he’d lost his nerve and left.

 


	7. Chapter 7

vii. _**You try to warn him, you tell him / you will want to get inside him, and ruin him / but he doesn’t listen**_

__

**Year Six**

 

“Agent Coulson?”

Phil very pointedly moved his plate out of Clint’s reach before he left the table, ignoring Clint’s complaint of _but it was the last one_ and the _ouch!_ that meant that either Bobbi or Natasha had kicked him under the table.

“Agent Hill needs you to gather your team and keep them away from the meeting today,” Smith said, fidgeting with the sheet of paper he held, Hill’s sharp, precise writing covering at least one side. “She also wanted me to inform you that there will be a meeting at noon and that you’re to bring your assistant.”

His team? Since when did he have a team? The closest thing he’d ever had to a team had been his last group of junior agents, but they hadn’t lived to become fully fledged agents. It was only when he saw the way that Smith was watching the table he’d just left that it clicked.

“They’re not my team,” he said. They weren’t. If they asked, Sam and Sharon would probably be heading up their own teams, or working on covert ops, and he knew that Clint and Natasha were both more than capable, but didn’t want to be in charge of other agents. Bobbi had led a few ops when the original leaders had found themselves in tight corners, but Hannigan was still holding up anything related to field work because he was desperate to keep one of the best biologists they had in the lab.

Even if they hadn’t all been perfectly capable, Phil didn’t like thinking of them as his team. That made it sound like they belonged to him or that he had too much control over them, and he hated the way that made him feel, especially knowing Natasha and Clint’s histories, after what had happened to Bobbi.

“The junior agents call your office _The Aviary,_ sir.”

The nickname hadn’t been a surprise when he’d first heard it, but how nice it was had been. They’d called Hill’s office _The Dungeon_ when any agent in trouble had been sent there, and Fury’s office was usually _Face It, You’re Fucked_ if they were called there.

He was sure that Clint or Bobbi had come up with the one for Fury’s office—or possibly Sharon.

“Barton, if I come back and half my lunch is missing, I’m having the vents above my office sealed off from the rest of the system,” he said.

Phil heard Clint hiss, “How did he know?” as he left.

 

 

“While Agent Fury is obeying the World Security Council’s orders not to enact the Avengers Initiative, he’s also freezing the programme for the time being, instead of shutting it down complete. The final roster for the Helicarrier has been sent to all senior agents, who are to contact their agents or any colleagues they work closely with who are currently without a handler and inform them of their position.”

Agent Johnson cast one last look over her notes before she looked to Hill for guidance. Phil liked her. She was shaping up to be a capable agent, and fewer agents than anyone would have liked made the transfer from full-time field work to the higher positions in SHIELD.

“Good,” Hill said. “Director Fury’s also finalised the roster for the Avengers Initiative; there have been two additions to the main team as well as several additions to the back-up and strike teams we have in place in case they’re overpowered or they’re incapacitated.”

Hill’s voice faded out as Phil started scrolling through the lists of names.

_Avengers Initiative (confirmed): Captain America (Steven Rogers), Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff), Hawkeye (Clinton F. Barton)._

Consultant: Iron Man (Tony A. Stark),

Supervising agents: Agent Philip J. Coulson, Agent Jasper Sitwell, Agent Daisy Johnson (probationary).

Strike Team A: Captain America (Steven Rogers), Falcon (Sam Wilson), Agent 19 (Sharon Carter).

Strike Team B: Ms Marvel (Colonel Carol Danvers), Power Man (Luke Cage), Iron Fist (Daniel Rand), Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew).

Prospective members: Agent Barbara Morse (Strike team B; field certificate required), Thor Odinson (Avengers Initiative; location unknown), the Hulk (Bruce Banner; Avengers Initiative).

“I can come,” Darcy volunteered, her voice breaking Phil’s concentration, and six different people immediately shot that idea down. “Hey, I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. I tased Thor and the guy who built all those evil robots! Come on, he screamed and wet himself. The evil dude, not Thor, and I know I almost stepped on—”

Phil shook his head, gesturing for her to join him away from the main group as people slowly started to trickle out of the room.

“This isn’t about how capable you are. All non-essential personnel are being sent to the smaller bases. It’s safer that way. It’s not that you can’t take care of yourself, it’s that we don’t want to risk any more people than absolutely necessary. We don’t know what the Tesseract does and, until we know for sure, we don’t want to put people in danger.”

“Okay, but you have to come back. I love Sam, Sharon and Bobbi, but the other agents are going to eat me alive, and they confiscate my taser whenever we have a meeting.”

He handed her a cell phone, one of the ones he always kept in his desk for when Clint and/or Natasha damaged or lost theirs on ops. It wasn’t anything special, with just enough SHIELD technology to make it difficult to trace someone if they didn’t want to be found.

“There are numbers in here for Agents Wilson, Carter and Morse. If there’s an emergency evacuation or the fifth siren goes off, find or call one of them and tell them that they’re to enact protocol 001F.”

Darcy frowned. “I don’t know what protocol 001F is.”

“That doesn’t matter, they do. If you can’t find any of them, Agents Sitwell and Hill’s numbers are in there as well. Call them and they will tell you what to do, okay?”

She nodded, clutching the phone with both hands.

Phil waited until she left before sighing. He hadn’t even wanted an assistant, let alone one who was willing to go up against who knew what. He’d ask Fury to put her with someone else, but she brightened up the entire floor--sometimes literally; his files were now colour-coded by both the threat level present by the subject and how hazardous the operation would be. Barton’s reports from medical (usually partially completed with a note that he’d disappeared halfway through treatment) always arrived with a sad face sticker. A gold star was added once Bobbi had found him and forced him to either go to Medical or have Medical send whatever needed to be administered to Phil’s office.

Clint was sitting on the end of the table. He must have been in the vents again. Security was going to have a fit, if they’d ever stopped their monthly meetings where they despaired over him. “Protocol 001F, I don’t think I’ve heard of that one before. Or any of the 001 set, come to think of it.”

“You haven’t. They’re only to be used in dire circumstances.”

“Got any examples?”

“An invasion by or threatened by hostile forces with abilities that outmatch our own.”

“Huh.” Clint appeared to think about that for a minute. “What does 001F do?”

“It evacuates all non-essential agents, including agents who are on medical or administrative leave, to an area outside of the combat zone.”

Clint kicked one of the chairs out, settling his feet on it and leaning on his knees. For some reason, it reminded Phil of sitting on the couch at his apartment, Clint’s toes tucked under his thigh as he complained about the reality TV shows, but complained even more when Phil gave in and tried to change the channel. “It saves their lives.” When Phil didn’t say anything, he added, “This is going to get messy, isn’t it?”

Phil didn’t confirm or deny it. He didn’t want to, but he had a bad feeling about the whole situation. It had been building ever since New Mexico and it was only getting worse. It was a familiar feeling, but he hadn’t felt it for a long time.

"Well, I've gotta go," Clint slid off the table. "I'm on guard duty again.  Hopefully they won't try and explain it to be again; all I got the last time is that it's a door. The rest was like before Tasha started teaching me Russian."

 

 

_”You ever have one of those days when you wake up and feel like you’re going to die?” Marcus asked, nudging one of the dead men with the toe of his boot. One of twenty-two. Christ, they were going to die here. “That’s how I felt this morning.”_

_“We’re lucky you were wrong, then, weren’t we?” Phil said flatly. He’d felt the same when he’d woken up. That knot of tension in the pit of his stomach, the thought of a clock ticking down the seconds until his life was over and his parents would be getting a damn flag back instead of their son._

 

 

“You have heart,” he said, and it was like something was crawling through Clint’s veins.

_Sitting in the mess, making a half-hearted attempt to keep his apple pie away from Bobbi._

Half asleep on the couch in Coulson’s office as he spoke to Fury, letting the sound of the argument (that wasn’t quite an argument) lull him to sleep.

Offering his arm to Sharon before they headed into the ballroom, smiling when she laughed and said that she’d never have imagined him as a gentleman.

Trying to convince Sam that, yes, it had been a good move to jump off that building because the perch thirty feet down was a lot better, while Sam alternated between threatening to drop him the next time and telling him to shut up and watch the movie.

 

 

“We’ve got a live one over here!”

Bobbi limped through the final set of makeshift access gates, ignoring the offers of help from two other agents. She didn’t need help, she needed to find people she recognised. There was no sign of anyone from her lab, Lab 4, but she hadn’t seen anyone from Lab 1 either, which didn’t bode well for Clint. She wished that Sam was there; he would have taken one took at the number of agents milling around and decided to get a look from up high. Or Sharon; she would have taken to the databases and found some way to find and identify anyone. Natasha was still away on an op and wasn’t due back for at least a day.

“Could you please make sure that all Phase 2 weapons removed from the building before its collapse are kept separate from the ones we’ve just recovered? Don’t put them all in the same truck, Simmons! I need you to find me someone from R&D, preferably Lawson or one of the other chief scientists. And someone find the biologists and chemists; we need to find out if there were any hazardous materials in the building.”

 _Finally_.

Bobbi sidled up beside Coulson, who looked relatively unscathed compared to most of the agents she’d seen since getting out of what remained of the building. He wasn’t bleeding and there was no sign of concrete dust on his suit.

“Can you please point the floodlights away from the people who have already made it out? You’re turning us all into targets!” Sitwell shouted as he walked past, nodding at Coulson. “Empty spaces only, please, with as little light as possible on groups—and I’ve already got one agent who’s seeing spots.”

Closer to the front, there were other agents who had obviously made it out of the building before the collapse. They looked a little shell-shocked and dirty, most of the dust having come from helping with the rescue effort, but looked more alert than the agents Bobbi had passed on the way, sitting near the wreckage and staring at the ground.

“Listen up!” Hill shouted from the front. If she craned her neck, Bobbi could just make her out through the dust still being stirred up, standing on top of one of the transport trucks. “If I call out your name, you’re being assigned to the Helicarrier. If your name isn’t called, report to Agent Sitwell to be assigned to another facility or to the rescue effort. This assignment is going to be in effect for the foreseeable future, and I don’t want to hear any arguments about positions. The quicker we get this done, the quicker we get back to work and clean up this mess. Do you all understand?” The only sound was the occasional mutters of conversations that hadn’t quite died out. “Good.”

“Clint?” Bobbi asked as Hill started to call out the names of various agents. She took the opportunity to take the portable fingerprint scanner from Coulson and press her thumb to it, establishing that she wasn’t buried under the building and that she was alive. The flashing ‘deceased’ label made her feel ill. How many people had they recovered and entered into the database as deceased?

Coulson shook his head and, for one horrible second, she thought that Clint was still inside. “Loki.”

“The one who did all this?” she gestured vaguely behind them, towards the wreckage. Clint being trapped was starting to look like a better option. The name had come up in some of the reports from New Mexico, but the details were sketchy and the most Bobbi had managed to gleam from some of the looser lipped R&D scientists was that the Phase 2 weapons were based on technology from that incident.

“Yes.”

“Agent Coulson,” Hill called out. No one looked surprised.

“How did you get out?”

Bobbi laughed, a little rueful. “I picked a good time for a bathroom break. I left Lab 4 about five minutes before Lab 1 started alerting us that something was wrong.” She held up the remains of her battle staves. They’d snapped just below the point where they’d been screwed together. “I had to use these to prop open an exit when the building was falling. R&D did a good job on them, but they were never supposed to be used to hold up part of a wall.”

Coulson made a note on his phone. “I’ll make sure that they’re replaced as soon as possible. Until then, you’ll have to work with whatever you can find. We’re running low on weapons, and Phase 2 still hasn’t been released.”

“Agent Morse.”

Bobbi looked towards Hill. She couldn’t have heard that right. She had made the short list of agents to be assigned to the Helicarrier, but she’d been struck off in the final meeting, according to Clint. They’d claimed that she didn’t have enough hand to hand combat and firearms training (which was untrue; she’d spent more time on the range and in the gym than half the agents who were in the field full-time, and she could usually take Clint down).

She started to smile, but caught the look on Coulson’s face. “What?”

“Loki can control others,” Coulson explained. Bobbi felt her stomach sink. “He took Clint and Selvig. We don’t know what he’ll do, but you need to know that before you make any decisions.”

Bobbi swallowed, but tilted her chin up defiantly. “I’m not going to spend my life being afraid of every single thing that could control me because of the Phantom Rider.”

The fear wouldn’t control her; she wouldn’t let it.

She thought that Coulson would pull rank and refuse point blank to let her on the Helicarrier, but he smiled instead.

“Congratulations Agent Morse, it looks like I’ll be seeing you on the Helicarrier.”

 

 

“Oh, come on!” Sam didn’t bury his head under the pillow, but it was a close call. “Did they miss me playing guardian angel to their junior agents for the last two days?”

Normally, he wouldn’t have minded being woken up early. He’d been working for SHIELD for long enough that he’d found tricks to fit sleep around a normal week’s ops, paperwork and meals.

But it hadn’t been a normal week--or a normal month, for that matter. Sam and Sharon had spent more hours out of the office than he’d spent in it, and Sam knew that he was at least a week behind on paperwork, not because he hadn’t been doing it, but because there were suddenly five more forms for every operation, and new ones to replace all the old ones. The last week had been hellish, and that had been before they’d spent forty-eight hours on a roof, waiting for HYDRA goons to turn up (they hadn’t) and four hours of paperwork. The HYDRA agents hadn’t turned up, but more than one junior agent had shown that they couldn’t judge the distance between buildings to save their lives.

Now they were trying to wake them up in the middle of the night? The earliest he could have fallen asleep was at nine, after working for two days straight. Why did they always forget that their agents had to sleep at some point between ops? Sam had never missed having Coulson and Hill in the office so much before. At least then they’d been allowed to have longer breaks.

Recently it was beginning to feel like a vicious cycle of op after op after op, punctuated by too much paperwork and too little sleep.

Sharon raised her head from Coulson’s desk. Half of her hair had escaped the previously neat ponytail and most of the rest was sticking up at odd angles.

“If this turns out to be another 0789A, I’m going to make them catch them themselves,” she muttered, groping around under the paperwork for her cell phone. “If it’s a 0789B, R&D will be catching them and keeping them as pets, especially if it turns out they came from R&D in the first place.”

Sam hummed in agreement and searched half-heartedly between the couch cushions for his own cell phone. He was still looking when the noise stopped and he looked up to see Sharon staring at her cell, looking surprised. That was never a good sign; the last time she’d looked shocked had been when a giant lizard had tried to eat her.

“That’s not a call.” She turned it around, showing him the flashing _0001F_ on the screen.

Sam mentally ran through the SHIELD emergency protocols. Most of them were the same, but each individual facility had their own slightly different set. 001F was always an evacuation of some sort.

“Who sent it?” he asked, pulling his coat out from under his finished paperwork. It was thin enough that the harness and wings would fit over it easily, even with his own suit on under his street clothes. It would allow him to transition smoothly between Falcon and Sam, without getting any funny looks. He wasn’t repeating the public bathroom incident.

“Coulson.”

That meant that the protocols were from the primary set, the ones that were only brought out in a major, SHIELD wide emergency.

 _0001F - Evacuate all non-essential agents, including agents who are on medical or administrative leave, to an area outside of the combat zone._ Their own orders were to evacuate to an address outside the city. Sam wasn’t sure whose house it was, but Coulson had said that it could also be used as a safe house in an emergency, so hopefully it was safe.

“I’m going to get one of the cars,” Sharon said, already fixing her hair with one hand as she typed something up on the computer with the other. Sam opened the closest laptop and locked all the files he could access to anyone who didn’t have Level 6 clearance or above. “I’ll meet you on the roof in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ve got Darcy’s address.” It was an apartment, which Sam was infinitely grateful for. It was always easier to get into an apartment than a house, especially when the person lived on one of the higher floors. Houses required getting lower and turning himself into an easier target for anyone who was watching. “Eight storeys with a fire escape. If you drop me off, I can either climb or fly to her window.”

 

 

It was the siren that woke Darcy up.

 _If this is Clint playing another trick on me, I’m going to kill him_ she thought as she untangled herself from the sheets and groped along the bedside cabinet for her cell phone. _Or I’ll ask Natasha to kill him for me. I wonder if Bobbi wants another training session?_.

 _CODE 0001F_ flashed across the screen. Darcy stared at it. No. That was the one Coulson had talked about after the meeting about the Tesseract.

“Okay, I need to call--” someone tapped on her bedroom window and Darcy dropped her phone in shock when she saw who it was. “Sam?”

Sam made sure that the wings were folded in before he ducked in through the window, climbing over the desk as if it was nothing. Darcy supposed that, for someone who could fly, it really was.

“You need to to pack an overnight bag, bring anything that’s very important to you, but nothing too heavy. We have to meet Sharon on the roof as soon as possible.”

“We’re evacuating, aren’t we? This isn’t a drill?” She started to pull clothes out of her closet. Shirts, jeans, a waterproof jacket and one she’d had for years that was too warm and comfortable to throw out.

“I wish it was. Give them to me?” Sam pulled her small suitcase out from under her bed and unzipped it. Darcy thought about being offended that he somehow knew where everything in her apartment was kept, but was distracted by the way he was quickly folding everything she threw him before he put it in the suitcase.

 _Does SHIELD put them all through a course?_ She’d seen Coulson do it a few times when Clint and Natasha had dropped by his office with armfuls of dirty or blood-stained clothes.

“Is this everything?”

Darcy grabbed her laptop and bag before nodding.

 

 

It took Amanda a moment to work out why she’d woken up. Her alarm told her that it was the early hours of the morning, so that wasn’t it. Lucy and Timmy were both quiet, so it wasn’t a surprise fight. Her phone was switched off and her superiors knew that she was on a non-negotiable vacation.

The door. That was what it was. She listened to Timmy tiptoeing down the stairs. He wasn’t very good at it; the Coulson stealth was either going to skip his generation or it had been cancelled out by the James clumsiness.

If Colin had forgotten his key again, he’d be sleeping on the couch until his birthday...

She didn’t open her eyes until the vase in the hall was knocked over and she heard Timmy scrambled around to pick it up. Mustn’t have been Colin then. If it was one of her colleagues then she was going to quit, she really was.

“Mom, there are people at the door. I don’t know who they are.”

Amanda sat up, instinctively reaching for the top drawer of the cabinet beside her bed and pushing her hair away from her face. “What?”

“I looked and there are three people there. The man has wings,” Timmy shrugged. Lucy peeked out from behind him. The stealth had obviously only missed Timmy. “They weren’t in any the pictures you showed me.”

That wasn’t good. Anyone who had a chance of visiting the house, from relatives to colleagues who might call on her in the middle of the night, had been in those photos. Strangers“Okay, honey, I need you to take Lucy and go down to the basement. Don’t come out until I say you can. Do you understand that?”

Timmy nodded solemnly and tugged his little sister down the hall. Amanda waited until she heard the door lock automatically behind them before she pulled her gun out of the bedside cabinet.

She crept along and hall, pausing to check the door to the basement, before she approached the front door.

The one-way glass beside the door had been one of her favourite additions to the house when she’d bought it, and Amanda had never been so grateful for it. It gave her a good view on the people standing on her doorstep.

Three people. Two women and one man. The man looked like he would be a threat: he wasn’t the biggest guy Amanda had seen, but he had the look of someone who had been in more than his fair share of fights and had won most of them. Sure enough, he had wings. One of the women had her hand resting on the butt of her gun, as if ready to draw it at any second. The second women didn’t look like she’d be too much trouble if it came down a fight.

Go for the blonde, hope that was enough to scare off the man and pray that she was right about the other one.

She threw open the door, raised her gun and pointed it at the blonde’s head.

“Who are you?”

The man held his hands up, but it did little to lessen the threat. He had _wings_. They had obviously been built and were attached by a sophisticated looking harness, but they were _wings_. They weren’t exactly standard issue for criminals or whatever they were. The smaller woman, the one with the long dark hair, took a step backwards.

“No one told me there would be guns. I didn’t bring the taster R&D gave me for my birthday, Sam!”

The blonde woman drew her own gun, levelling it in a way that spoke of both experience and a willingness to shoot if she had to. Well, that made two of them.

“We’re not here to threaten you or kill you. My name is Sharon Carter, this is Sam Wilson and that is Darcy Lewis. We work for SHIELD. We were sent here by someone we work with; his name is Agent Coulson. He told us that this would be a safe place.”

Amanda blinked, but didn’t dare to rub her eyes. Sam. Sharon. She knew those names. Why did she know those names? Phil’s apartment. The agents he worked with. They looked different without the jeans and t-shirts they’d been wearing that day. And the wings. The wings were a _big_ change.

“Phil?” Of course this was Phil’s doing. She’d managed to get a little information about his colleagues out of him, but there hadn’t been anything about wings or them turning up on her doorstep unannounced.

“We met at his apartment, do you remember that?” Carter asked at the exact same time Lewis said, “You call him _Phil_?”

Amanda pinched the bridge of her nose. She was going to kill Phil when she got her hands on him.

“You should come in.”

 

 

Amanda Coulson was, when it came down to it, a nice person when she wasn’t pointing a gun at your head. In fact, she went from nice to lovely when she’d made sure that they were who she thought they were. Sharon had come to that conclusion shortly after she’d offered them all coffee and told them that she’d happily let them reap the spoils of the inevitable blackmail that was going to come from her brother offering to let people she didn’t know use her house.

“It’s a lockdown.” Sam held up his phone. “I’m locked out of everything that isn’t related to the evacuation. I can’t even get hold of Bobbi—she should have evacuated with us.”

“That settles it; we’re going back to New York.”

“Not enough gas, or whatever R&D puts in the cars. We barely made it here.”

“We’re just supposed to stay here and wait for news?” Sharon folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not sitting around doing nothing while our friends might be dying somewhere. I don’t care if I have to walk back to New York.”

“Sharon?” Sam called from the computer, where he going over the evacuation procedure and checking in. “You’re going to want to take a look at this.”

He turned the tablet around and held it up so that they could both get a good look at it.

“What is that?” Darcy asked, looking up from where she was reading to Lucy. Timmy was scrolling through photos on her computer--photos that looked an awful lot like they’d come from the various facilities SHIELD had infiltrated and/or taken down.

Yes, there was a photo of one of the decapitated giant lizards from Budapest, with Bobbi standing beside it and holding up the saw. She plucked it out of his hands, ignoring the glare. Sharon wasn’t going to be responsible for another child needing therapy and, if he did, Clint was going to be paying for it because there was no other way Darcy could have gotten hold of that photo.

“It’s a list of all the people who have worked with or for SHIELD recently, ranked by how likely they are to be targeted by any of our enemies. It was brought up when an alert was issued, they’re calling whatever’s going on an alien invasion.” Sharon scrolled through the names, reading the names, numbers and the two different addresses. “It’s an evacuation list. Do you know what this means?”

“You’re not walking to New York?”

“We’re heading up the evacuation of every single person on this list,” Sharon’s face lit up and she turned to Amanda, who was sitting on the couch, looking confused. “Amanda, we’re going to need access to your phone, your broadband connection and as many sockets as you can spare.”

 

 

It felt cold inside his head, a creeping iciness that spread through his body and muffled every thought Clint had.

“Tell me about the people you work with, Agent Barton.”

And Clint did. It all spilled out of him: Natasha’s past and everything she was trying to atone for, but didn’t think she could; Sam’s desire to help people and him being the person everyone went to for comfort; Sharon’s love of her aunt and how she put her job before almost everything; Bobbi’s fighting skills and how she’d come back even stronger after the incident with the Phantom Rider; Phil loving his family and their group, and how he’d even let Clint stay at his place.

Loki smiled.

 

 

It had only taken half an hour for the two SHIELD agents to turn Amanda’s laptops, her desktop computers and half of her living room into a makeshift command centre. Darcy had made herself scarce soon after they’d started, proclaiming that she didn’t ‘know anything about that stuff’ and that her security clearance probably wasn’t even high enough to view it without being interrogated by Natasha afterwards. Sam and Sharon had been running through the list for almost two hours since then, making notes and striking names off, or highlighting them. Amanda had recognised a few names, but most of them were completely alien to her.

“Voicemail again. I can’t get in touch with Jessica Jones, do you have any other numbers for her?” Sam asked, holding one hand over the mouthpiece.

Sharon said, “Try Luke Cage,” without bothering to cover her phone. “No, Doctor Pym, I understand that you’re in the middle of an important experiment, but the world is currently being invaded by aliens.” A pause. “We’ll see if we can get samples from them once the threat has been dealt with but, until then, you’ll need to evacuate.” She looked about ten seconds away from banging her head against the desk. “Is Jan there? Can you put her on?”

“Luke, is Jessica there? That’s great. Listen, we’ve got a few problems, so we need you to evacuate as soon as possible. Danny’s with you? Danny Rand? No, that’s great, you’ve just made my job a lot easier.” Sam struck the three names off his list. “You don’t know where Danvers and Drew are, do you?”

“You’ll make sure he leaves?” Sharon struck two names off of her list. “Thank you so much, Jan. I’ll make sure that someone calls you as soon as it’s safe.”

Amanda looked over to where Darcy was keeping Lucy and Timmy occupied. She was acting out what Amanda suspected was another SHIELD agent beating someone up, using two garden canes instead of weapons.

“What’s going on?” she asked when Sam hung up the phone. The tablet he’d been working with only showed a handful of names in red, the majority of them glowing green. “You’re talking about _aliens invading_ , but you won’t tell me anything. Well, I don’t know if Phil told you, but I work for the CIA; I’ve dealt with secure information before.”

“It is an alien invasion, but these protocols are usually only enacted when it gets really bad. There was no warning before it happened, so we know that it’s already bad. ‘End of the world’ bad.”

That wasn’t what she’d been expecting, but Amanda could work with it. Her mom had always said that one of their best family traits was the ability to make the best of a bad situation, whether it was using one of the complete strangers as a babysitter or processing news about an alien invasion without having a breakdown. Not that those two situations had come up before, but she assumed that they were included. They were, after all, bad situations.

She took a deep breath. “A really bad alien invasion? Okay... And my brother is involved in some way?”

Sam nodded.

Thank God that Colin was still trying to broker a deal in Sydney. He wasn’t that great under pressure.

“Wonderful.”

 

 

Bobbi was heading for Medical when she caught a glimpse of men with guns that hadn’t come from the onboard armory. She dropped back into one of the alcoves to watch them pass, led by someone she would have recognised anywhere.

 _Clint_. His eyes looked wrong, foggy and blue, but it was definitely him.

It was a bad idea. It was worse than a bad idea, and Bobbi was sure that Sharon and Coulson would never let her hear the end of it when this was all over, but she couldn’t just let Clint keep going and keep killing people, could she? She climbed up into one of the vents and started to follow him. She watched as, one by one, he sent his goons off down other corridors, after other people. He didn’t shoot anyone personally though, and something about that felt wrong. Why wasn’t Loki making him use all of his skills? Sure, knowledge of the helicarrier was good, but she’d seen him take out five men with two arrows.

Clint turned and looked right at her. Bobbi scrambled back a few inches as he raised his bow.

Oh, fuck, she was going to be killed by one of her best friends, on a helicarrier she’d always wanted to work on.

For a second he just looked at her, those blue eyes disturbingly blank, before he lowered his bow a few inches.

What was he doing?

The arrow hit the vent a few inches below her, but nothing happened. Bobbi had seen him practice enough to know what was going to happen next. She turned and started to crawl as fast as she could, ignoring the small blast behind her, but taking careful note of the way that someone’s poor, heavy attempts to chase her followed it.

 

 

The Helicarrier slowly started to tilt to one side. Bobbi braced herself, but kept going, chancing a look over her shoulder to check that Clint’s little friend was still following her. He was, and with a single-mindedness that said that he wasn’t under Loki’s control. His eyes were too clear, too sharp, too murderous.

“Oh, great, someone else SHIELD’s pissed off,” she muttered under her breath, speeding up. She’d known that all those times she’d followed Clint through the vents at HQ would come in useful, she just hadn’t known _how_ useful they’d be. She just had to lead him back to the breach without letting him catch her first. That wouldn’t be too hard; she’d studied the plans with Clint, knew all the twists and turns and knew one vital thing: there was always a simple way to use the vents to get back to where you started.

And there it was. Bobbi could just see the place where the vent had been ripped open by Clint’s arrow, and it was definitely close enough for her to make it. She scrambled across the gap and rolled onto her back, breathing hard.

_Five_

He was getting closer.

_Four_

He was approaching the gap.

_Three_

Struggling across it.

_Two_

Pulling himself up.

_One_

He was almost on her.

Bobbi sat up, bringing the battle staves up and hitting him hard on each side of his neck. She saw his eyes widen in horror when he realised what she was going to do, and then she twisted.

It wasn’t her favourite move, or even her best one, but it was useful when there was a great big hole in the side of the vent. He fell sideways, squirming helplessly in mid-air for a second before he pulled Bobbi down with him. They hit the ground under the vent hard, his skull making an audible _cruch_ he hit his head on the ground.

Oh, well. Bobbi coughed, pulled the now completely ruined battle staves away from his neck. They definitely weren’t salvageable now, but she was going to keep them in her armoury all the same. They’d be a nice reminder of how she’d almost been killed the first time she’d set foot on the Helicarrier.

“Are you okay?” Natasha asked, as she came down the corridor. “Have you seen Clint?”

“I’m fine,” Bobbi said, waving Natasha away and picking herself up off the ground and wiping the blood from her forehead. It didn’t feel like she had a concussion, but she’d been wrong before. She’d been spending too much time around Clint. “He’d headed towards the armoury. Hey, you!”

Two slightly startled agents immediately snapped to attention. Huh. That was new, and pretty damn fun.

“I need you to cuff him and get him to Medical, I think I fractured his skull when we fell.”

 

 

_His world was blue, but things flashed past, just recognisable enough for him to grab them and cling to them._

_Don’t kill him. Centre mass instead of the head. Save a life._

_Not that way. Too many agents. That corridor leads to the armory._

_Woman with blonde hair. Air vents. Familiar. Don’t hit her. Hit the vents._

Clint had a sudden, sickening thought. "Sharon, Sam and Bobbi?" Had he not seen Sharon and Sam, or had he not recognised them?

"Bobbi was on the Helicarrier, but she’s fine, other than a headache and some bruises, Sam and Sharon evacuated with Darcy. They checked in with our system; they’re at Amanda’s house. The emergency protocols stopped them from coming back."

Protocol 0001F. So it had been as bad as he’d thought. No, it had been worse.

“His sister must have loved that. She’ll have already left him thirteen voicemails already, complaining about people turning up out of the blue,” Clint said, and it felt like everything in the room just stopped.

Phil. Natasha hadn't mentioned what had happened to him, and Clint knew what that meant, what had happened. He swallowed hard (he wasn't going to be sick, not here and not now).

"Was it...?" Clint couldn’t bring himself to finish the question. Had it been him? Had he killed Phil, like he’d killed the others? Had he killed the person who had saved him?

"No.” Natasha looked away, as if she couldn’t think about what had happened and look at him at the same time. “It was Loki. He went to make sure Loki didn't escape, but Loki can duplicate himself.” _That wasn’t in the file_ , Clint heard, although she didn’t say it. “Loki stabbed him.”

No names. If they never said his name, they could pretend that they were talking about someone else, a nameless, faceless agent they’d never met, someone they didn’t care about. _He_ had taught Clint that, not long after the night on the rooftop, while he’d been cleaning the wound in Clint’s shoulder. Never use his brother’s name, separate himself from him until he wasn’t his brother, until he was just a figure, a target to be taken down if they ever met in the future. Strip away everything that made it personal.

Clint thought about Stark’s file, and Rogers’, and what they both had in common: a good man ended up dying.

He just made it to the bathroom before he was sick.

 

 

The medic had not long left when someone else opened the door. Steve Rogers opened his mouth to speak and then just stared at her. Bobbi thought that she was probably the one who was allowed to stare, given that Captain America was standing in front of her, wearing his uniform.

"Sorry, ma'am," he said, almost stumbling on the sorry before he caught himself. "I was looking for Agent Romanoff, but I think I've got the wrong room."

"She's with Cli--Agent Barton. Two doors down," she added when he didn't move.

Rogers nodded and backed out of the room. Well, he seemed nice enough. Bobbi waited until the doctor returned to collect the handful of forms he’d filled in, examining her broken battle staves. They weren’t even salvageable, the broken edges stained with blood and cracks running right through them. Hopefully Coulson had managed to get the orders to R&D before all hell had broken loose. And, speaking of Coulson...

Bobbi stepped in front of the doctor as he went to leave. “Do have any spare earpieces? I lost mine earlier and I need to get in contact with Agent Coulson.”

The doctor just stared at her and Bobbi could feel her stomach beginning to churn. It wasn’t the way Rogers had stared, it was more like he was dreading telling her something, not just surprised by her presence. “You don’t know what happened, do you?”

“What?” She wasn’t going to be sick, not when it would get her confined to Medical for the next twenty-four hours because they’d think she had a concussion.

“Agent Coulson was stabbed by Loki. He was pronounced dead when the team reached him. I’m sorry; I thought everyone had been informed.”

Bobbi clenched her hands into fists, her nails biting into her palms.

They hadn’t named any of the dead from the building collapse when Loki had first arrived so, although there had been a faint feeling of grief, it wasn’t the same. Those people didn’t have names or faces to her; for all she knew, they were all strangers she’d walked past a few times. They had been colleagues, not friends.

She looked up just in time to see Clint walking past with Natasha and Rogers. He watched her through the window, looking exhausted and ragged around the edges. He knew what had happened, Bobbi was sure of it.

 _Come back alive_ , she mouthed, knowing that he wouldn’t catch the words, but he nodded all the same.

 

 

Clint practiced the story in front of a mirror (like he was a kid again, trying to smile when he had a black eye, like he was a teenager trying to mask the bruises around his wrists, hide it all with a smile bright enough that no one looked anywhere else).

_He was going home after work, and he stopped at a store for something. There was an incident—_

Too impersonal. Amanda knew him, knew that they were friends.

_He said that he had to pick up some milk on the way home and—_

No.

_Something happened. There was a robbery, and the gunman tried to grab a kid to use as a hostage, and Phil got in the way._

It wasn’t like the smile: the lie didn’t get any easier the more times he told it.

All Clint wanted to do was tell the truth.

_You know all the stuff that’s been on the news? Phil was involved in it. He went to work, and he met Captain America, and he wanted the Avengers Initiative to work, but the others wouldn’t stop arguing and then the Hulk started destroying the Helicarrier while it was threatening to fall out of the sky. The guards left and Loki got out of his cage, and stabbed him in the back. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry._

_Where was I?_ he didn’t think. _Oh, I was helping Loki because I was under his control. I worked with Phil for years, he saved my life, and I wasn’t even there when he died_.

He’d watched the security footage dozens of times.

“But, hey,” he said to the mirror. “At least Captain America and Iron Man stopped arguing, right?”

 

 

_Rewind, play._

Coulson said something, Clint wasn’t sure what – the recording was too fuzzy to make anything out, and he hadn’t been able to find any audio – and there was a second where it actually looked like he’d got one over on Loki before he was stabbed in the back.

_Rewind, play._

Coulson said something. It looked like he’d won, like they’d won, and then—

Natasha snatched the tablet from him and pushed a drink across the table. Well, maybe it would have been a drink if it hadn’t been an entire bottle. It looked more like alcohol poisoning and another trip to Medical.

“It’s not going to change, no matter how many times you watch it.”

It didn’t smell like vodka, but it made his throat burn and he coughed.

“Thanks,” Clint said, but he didn’t say _I think I loved him_ because it wasn’t fair to say that to anyone else when he’d never quite got around to telling Phil. “You...you don’t think it’s all going to be over so fast, do you? I mean, one day he’s telling us to submit out paperwork in the next forty-eight hours,” _not the next two weeks, Barton_ , “and the next he’s... not there.”

Natasha took a long drink from her bottle. “You always think you’re going to have longer.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. They took a lot from us, including a lot of memories. It’s one of the reasons that I eventually left; they took too much and kept asking for more.”

“Sorry.”

“Thank you.”

 _Pull it 'til it breaks_ , Clint thought.  _Snap_.

 

 

“There’s a downed Chitauri transport vehicle and a foot soldier on their way to the main lab for Doctor Pym to examine,” Sharon read off the tablet she had balanced on top of the pink folder that was usually on Darcy’s desk. “Bobbi, Natasha left one of the Chitauri weapons for you to test. She said that it hasn’t been working very well since she stabbed one of them with it, but to do what you can.”

Bobbi flicked open the latches on the box and ran careful fingers across the surface. More like a spear than a gun, it was impressive all right, and definitely very alien. Inactive or not, it would a lot of fun to use for combat training in close quarters when she got it down to the gym—if Clint didn’t ‘borrow’ it first.

“Where _is_ Clint?” she asked. He’d love it, even if she’d have to log it with Coulson first—

No. She wouldn’t have to log it with Coulson. Coulson wasn’t there to log it with now.

“Coulson’s office,” Sam said, crouching down to examine the weapon. “Broke in after he got out of the debriefing and hasn’t left there since.”

Oh, of course they’d shut Coulson’s office up. Bobbi had heard of it being done before, rumours about the offices and computers being purged of anything that pointed to the person who used to work there, but she’d never actually been around when it happened. No one that high up had been killed or defected since she’d started working for SHIELD.

“You should show him your new toy.” Sam hefted it up, balancing the weight carefully. “He’ll love it.”

 

 

“Why did you join SHIELD?”

Bobbi was sitting in the makeshift lab they’d put together in one of the smaller places they’d used as headquarters in the past. Her lab coat, the edges of one sleeve singed, was hanging on the coat hook on the back of the door and a box of gloves was lying on the table in front of her. There was no sign that anyone had or would be using the lab anytime soon.

“The recruitment speech promised excitement,” she said flatly and gestured out the window to where smoke could just be seen drifting over buildings. “What about you? Did you join because they said it would be fun?”

 _No. I never thought it would be fun and I always knew it wouldn’t be easy._ “I joined because I always wanted to help people.” Which was funny when Clint thought about it, because he’d probably hurt a lot more people than he’d helped, but wasn’t that always what happened? He tried to help and ended up doing the exact opposite or making the situation worse.

“That wasn’t you,” Bobbi said. “It was Loki. The part that was you was the part that didn’t shoot Fury, didn’t kill me--and don’t even argue with me, Barton. I’ve read the reports; I know what happened. You could have shot Fury in the head and you didn’t. You had a straight shot at me, but you hit the wall beside the vent instead. _That_ was you.”

“That’s not what the other agents think.”

_How long before he flips out and kills us all?_

I give it six months before he goes back to working for Loki.

This is why assets are supposed to be disposable. You let them become agents and they try to kill us all.

“R&D is looking for guinea pigs. Give me their names and ignore them unless they run screaming out of R&D with bright orange skin and tentacles.”

Clint laughed. “Did you have to bring that up?” The image of a huge, octopus-like SHIELD agent screaming and trying to crawl through the vents wasn’t one he was ever going to forget, and it was also one that he didn’t want to remember regularly. Even if the agent in question had been an asshole who’d doubted if it was safe to put Natasha in the field. It had been funny, though. Until he’d started _oozing_.

Patting him on the shoulder (and probably mocking him at the same time--which, hey, was probably why they called her Mockingbird -- Bobbi said, “Just trying to make you feel better. I know how much you _love_ R &D stories.”

He’d rather have Bobbi mocking him, Natasha pouring drinks down his throat, Fury telling him to get back to work, Sam telling that he wouldn’t have fallen off that building if he hadn’t been on a ledge that was too narrow in the first place, and Sharon complaining about having to prepare referrals to Psych for half the agents, than the agents who looked at him like they suddenly expected his eyes to flood blue again.

"How did you do it?" Clint asked, leaning forward until he could rest his elbows on the bench and cover his eyes. He couldn't even see anyone, but he could still see them watching him and whispering. It made his head ache, even before he thought of his upcoming meeting with Fury. "After the Phantom Rider, how did you do it? How  did you come back and act normal?"

Bobbi sighed, rubbing his back slowly. "I tell myself that he doesn't control me, that I'm not his. Some days it sucks, others... It's like it never happened. It doesn't happen overnight, though."

Clint wished it would. He wished that everyone would stop whispering, that Loki had never set foot on the Helicarrier, that Phil would magically stop being dead.

 

 

"I hear you've been avoiding your appointments with the therapist who  was assigned to you." For once, Fury didn't sound like he was going to rip Clint a new one for disobeying a direct order. If anything, he sounded tired, maybe even sad. He had, after all, known Phil for a long time, judging by the rumours.

Clint sat down opposite Fury. Fury's desk was nothing like Phil's. Phil had plants and a growing pile of things that had been added to the desk since his death, even with the office being locked. Sitwell had even put a ridiculous sweater on the desk, one Phil had had to borrow during an op a few years ago. Sharon was even watering the plants.

"I know that you don't want to go, and that you feel like they're all talking about you behind your back -- let me finish," he added when Clint opened his mouth to argue that they  _were_ talking about him behind his back. They did it all the time. "This won't stop them from talking, but you can't go on like this. Talking about it helps, I know that it doesn't feel like it, but it does. Talk to the shrink, talk to your friends, buy a pet and talk to it, just don't keep quiet about it. It doesn't help anyone, least all of you. The other agents will get over it, they don't have a choice, but you have one: you can lock it away and let it eat you from the inside out or you can start tearing it out."

It reminded Clint of the time Coulson had told him that, in order to get over what Barney had done, he had to rip out everything that had happened before, throw  it away before the infection set in. Clint had spent hours ranting about how Barney had only been there when it was convenient for him, how he'd never been there when it really mattered.

"Dismissed," Fury said. Clint blinked at him. "Get out, Barton. I'm going to make you an appointment with Doctor Kimball tomorrow at two, and you're going there if I have to assign Romanoff and Morse to make sure you get there."

Clint nodded and got up, palming his room key.

“Could you track down someone called Marcus Johnson?” Clint asked, hesitating in the doorway. Fury would probably tell him to get back to work, or book more appointments with a shrink, but Johnson, whoever he was, had been one of Coulson’s friends.

Fury paused, the phone still in his hand. “Why are you looking for Johnson?”

“Coulson mentioned him sometimes; they were friends. I don’t know if they lost touch or if they fell out or something, but…. They were friends. He deserves to know that he’s dead.” Clint didn’t really have any friends outside of other SHIELD agents, but if he ever did, he’d want them to know when he got killed.

Not looking at him, Fury said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

 

Steve Rogers was everything Clint had imagined him to be (not in the beginning, though, because Rogers had been a cardboard cut-out, something to bring hope to people, but then there had been Phil and Phil’s father). But it turned out that being a good person didn’t mean you got to live because heroes weren’t there at the right time, or you were a sort of hero and you got killed for it.

“I understand you worked with Agent Coulson for a long time. I know that I didn’t know him for very long, but he was a good man,” Rogers said, and Clint wanted to punch him.

“I hate good men.” At Rogers’ confused expression, Clint added, “They always die.”

Better to stay with those who had pulled themselves from the darker side of life, or even those who hadn’t. The Swordsman. Trick Shot. Barney (Trickshot, now, according to some sources, but his brother before, maybe even still; after all, he hadn’t killed Clint when he’d had the chance) and Natasha.

It was only fitting that one of the only truly good people he’d ever known, who’d ever cared about him, died.

 

 

It had been surprisingly easy to find a set of mint condition of Captain America cards. Fury had handed them to him after a meeting, along with an order to never tell anyone who gave them to him, and Steve didn’t plant on disobeying that order. He did wonder where Fury had found them, or why he’d even had them in the first place, but Steve knew better than to ask. There were some things you just didn’t ask about at SHIELD; where Fury had got the cards was only one of them.

Steve didn’t expect to find someone already in the office. A woman with long blonde hair—one of Sam’s friends, Agent Carter, maybe? He was sure that Agent Morse was the one Clint had been sparring with earlier that day, the one who’d invited him for drinks to celebrate her being allowed to take a field test in a week. Steve had politely declined and went looking for Agent Coulson’s office, the cards hidden in his pocket. Barton hadn’t said anything, just tried to pretend that he himself wasn’t there, even after Morse had poked him in the side.

Agent Carter’s eyes lingered on the cards in his hand, her lips quirking up at the edges. “You signed the cards?”

“Not the ones Fury showed me,” Steve said quickly. “They’re clean ones.” _They’re not covered in his blood_.

“He would have liked that. The signed cards, I mean.”

“You were friends with him?” Steve asked, watching the way the woman—agent, he corrected himself, she was an agent first and a woman second—leaned over the second fern and carefully poured some of the water into the pot.

“We’ve worked together for years,” Agent Carter said. “If you don’t like someone, you don’t work with them after the first month.”

“Whenever he was supervising a group of junior agents, he’d give them a test. It was a list of things, things like laptops and USB pens and a whole pile of other things, and he’d tell them to arrange them in order of importance and make sure that the important things were safe at the end of the month. Right at the bottom of the list, there was always something that everyone thought was pointless. It was usually a plant. A fern.” She smiled fondly, moving on to the next fern, a tiny one that was balancing on the edge of the desk. “I don’t even know what I’m telling you this. It doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“I want to hear it,” Steve reassured her. It had been a while since anyone had just told him something for the sake of telling him something. SHIELD agents seemed to spend most of their time talking about briefings and security threats. It was interesting, most of the time, but sometimes Steve just wanted to hear about _people_ and not their jobs. He’d heard enough about how Coulson had been a good agent, and not nearly enough about him as a person. “Please tell me the rest.”

She smiled at him. “By the end of the month, the fern was usually dead, and then Coulson would tell them to solve some sort of puzzle using the information from everything they had left. He’d never tell them that the most important thing was always hidden in the plant pot or on the fern. Obviously, they couldn’t do it without the plant, and they’d try for days or weeks before admitting it. Then Coulson would get them all into one of the meeting rooms and explain to them what he’d done. He always said it was because they needed to learn that even the most unimportant things could turn out to be crucial, but I think it was because he liked taking us down a peg before we got too comfortable.”

“He did it to you?”

“That’s how we met. My handler was on leave after he was shot, and Coulson was assigned to us. I was the only person in my group who thought the fern was important, so I kept it with me as much as possible. I even took it to the office I shared with the others, even though I hate having plants on my desk.” At Steve’s question look, she shrugged. “I get a lot of paperwork and plants all over the consoles and desks doesn’t make it any easier to fill it all in. I never did understand how he managed it.”

“You became friends with him after one month of him testing you?”

“No. After the test, he told me that I showed a lot of potential, but I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. He worked closely with Fury, had access to a lot of sensitive files, and everyone said that he didn’t take on junior agents, especially ones right out of college—and they were right. Coulson didn’t take me on, but he used to call me whenever an op was an agent short, vouched for me when it came to my handler deciding if I was going to stay a junior agent for another year, or be allowed full agent status.” She smiled again, but it was sadder and less open, like she was trying to get the memories back, as if she was afraid that they were gone now that she’d told him.

Agent Smith, an agent Steve had seen passing messages to most of the SHIELD agents he’d met, chose that moment to stumble through the door. He was balancing a box of what looked like more messages on top of a sealed box.

“Rogers, R&D want to talk to you about… uh….” Agent Smith rummaged through a box of slips of paper, all stamped with SHIELD’s insignia, before he pulled out one from the very bottom. “They want to talk to you about weapons and any modifications you want made to your shield or suit. Carter, have you seen Agent Morse?” He held up the sealed box, almost upending the box of memos before Steve grabbed them. “I’ve got the battle staves that Agent Coulson requested for her before he… Before the events on the Helicarrier.”

Carter held out her hand. “I’ll going to see her later tonight. I can give them to her. Do you have anything for Agents Wilson, Romanoff or Barton in there?”

“Three more requests for Barton to submit to a Psych eval before it becomes mandatory; one for Romanoff to stop threatening the agents who were traumatised by the events on the Helicarrier, no matter what they’re saying about Barton; a warning that one of the junior agents working in the biology labs is afraid of birds, so could Agent Wilson please make sure that Redwing doesn’t follow him there at any point and a message from your mother to say that your aunt was asking about you today,” he said without even glancing at the memos.

Carter nodded as she finished writing it all down. “Thanks. I’ll let you get back to work now.”

“Oh, please, I’d rather talk to you than run all over SHIELD and hope that they get their act together before I fall on the damn stairs.” Agent Smith took the box from Steve, thanking him quietly. “The elevators are still down. I didn’t even know that we had fifteen floors, plus three levels of quarters for agents and two levels of holding cells. That isn’t even counting the garages. Do you know how many agents spend time in the garages when they’re not on duty? Over a dozen.”

He sighed and ducked out of the room, complaining about stairs and SHIELD not even having hot water on most of the floors. Steve watched him go before he turned his attention back to Agent Carter, who was examining the… had Smith called them battle staves?

He should go to R&D before he was late, but disobeying orders was part of what had helped him to become Captain America in the first place; Steve had never liked leaving something half done or undone. He’d never been able to leave well enough alone. Bucky had always through it was funny.

“What’s your name?” Steve asked, stepping forward to lay the cards on the desk. He placed them face-up, carefully arranging them around the plants and avoiding a certificate with _FIELD TRAINING: HAND TO HAND COMBAT_ stamped across the top. “I mean, I’ve seen you around a lot, we’ll probably be working together at some point, and I don’t even know your full name.”

“Sharon,” she said. “My name’s Sharon.”

 

 

Nick had never enjoyed paperwork. Even years ago, when his name has still been Marcus and he’d been an Army Ranger, he’d hated the very thought of paperwork. Phil had always been a lot better at it, had never particularly minded writing reports after difficult days. He’d said that it helped him to come down from the adrenaline rush and settle after the chaos of the day.

Even Phil would have hated the paperwork after they finally made sure that Loki could cause no more harm. Most days, Nick had the World Security Council complaining in one ear and half of his agents begging for help in the other. They were understaffed. Agents Hanson, Zane and Gupta had all been sent to Medical after breaking down in tears halfway through an op. Two assets had turned on them and needed to be taken care of. No one was responding to any efforts to recruit them. They needed more lab technicians. They needed more field agents. They needed more equipment and time and a dozen other things that Nick couldn’t get them.

It was almost a relief when his phone rang halfway through typing up and email to explain that _no, you can’t order specialised weapons because there is no money in the budget to get them from anyone we don’t already have a contract with, so stop emailing me about it or you’ll find yourself unemployed_.

“Sir, I know that we were ordered to leave the body alone and that you vetoed samples being taken, let alone experiments, but--”

“Get to the point before I log your dismissal in the database,” he snapped. There was only one person he’d explicitly ordered them to send to the morgue without doing anything to it. It was an old promise, but one he’d intended to keep.

“Sir, we used the protocol and serums from Project Lazarus.”

Nick sat forward in his chair. “You better not mean what I think you mean.” If they're turned his friend into one of those mindless zombie-like creatures that had come out of that project before, he wasn't just going to fire them, he was going to  _kill_ them.

“No, sir, it isn’t like that--it isn’t like any of the other attempts. We’ve tested brain activity, eased the sedation enough for him to regain consciousness and answer questions; Agent Coulson has retained all of his memories and there’s no sign of brain damage. Sir, it worked. Project Lazarus was a success.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for that.”

“That’s the thing, sir. He told me to tell you that ‘Marcus added a few favours to the pile.’ Do you have any idea what he was referring to?”

Nick held the phone away from his ear and let himself laugh.

 

 

“Agent Romanoff.”

Natasha resisted the urge to just walk away from Hill and pretend that she hadn’t heard her. Even so soon after saving the city, she’d be written up for it. Steeling herself for the inevitable bureaucratic mess (if they tried to give her a new handler then she was going to use the Avengers Initiative to get out of it, because she wasn’t working for one of Fury’s lackeys), she turned around.

“You’re escorting Barton to Massachusetts?” Hill typed in what was most likely a password, judging from the green flash that lit up her face. She looked tired, but Natasha couldn’t bring herself to feel very much sympathy for her: no one had slept very much since Loki had arrived. Even now that Thor was preparing to take his brother back to Asgard, no one was relaxing. They were all waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I met Agent Coulson’s sister after Barton was injured on an op,” Natasha said. “It’s a better plan than sending a stranger to their home to tell them that their son is dead.” And a stranger wouldn’t be able to gauge Clint’s moods well enough to prevent him disappearing as soon as they turned their back.

“I’m assigning you to an operation. If anything in this document is compromised in any way, I’ll know exactly who’s to blame.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

“Because I trust you’ll know what to do with it.”

The first half of the file was full of floor plans, occasional photographs of the targets. Natasha stopped reading. She knew that man. She’d shot him in the head. Going back through the file, she recognised other things.

A floorplan of the warehouse where she’d first met Clint and where he’d later decided not to kill her. The safe house where she’d stayed with Clint and Coulson. A photograph of the basement in Budapest, where she’d believed she was going to die. More people she’d killed.

“Sam? Are you and Sharon busy?”

“We just finished making sure that every single person we evacuated knows that they can go home. We’re free, for now. We finally found Doctor Pym; he and Jan ran into another scientist, so they decided to visit his lab.”

“Good. I need your help with something. Hill gave me a file to prepare for an op, but I think she’s trying to tell us something.”

“You do know that three agents have had breakdowns since everything went down, don’t you? Maybe she’s joined them.”

“I don’t think so. I think she’s trying to tell us that Coulson’s still alive.”

 

  
“Stop it,” Natasha snapped as she stormed into Clint’s quarters. “I know that you’re grieving, but this won’t help anyone. Bobbi, Sharon and Sam knew him for a lot longer than you, but Sharon and Sam have just taken down a HYDRA cell and Bobbi’s still trying to get into the field full-time. If you want to have a breakdown, do it on someone else’s time. What Loki did, everything that happened, it wasn’t your fault. But if you keep staying up for days without sleep and ignore orders to get some rest, and something goes wrong? That’s on you, Clint, no one else.”

Clint pushed his feet against the wall until he felt his thigh twinge. It was the only thing, other than the scar on his thigh, that he had left from the day Phil had recruited him. Well, that and the bow Phil had been nice enough to salvage from the hotel room instead of letting some other SHIELD agent dispose of it.

“You’re my best friend,” he murmured against her shoulder.

Natasha smiled. “I’m one of your only friends.” She poked him in the side. “Come on, get up. Sitwell used his new Level 7 clearance and a guilt-trip to force Hannigan to put Bobbi through the tests to get her in the field full-time, and I volunteered you for the hand to hand combat section.”

 _Good old Sitwell_. Phil would have been proud. Pissed off that he was dead, but proud of Sitwell all the same. “I take it back. You’re not my best friend. You’re a cruel, cruel woman who wants to watch me get my ass kicked.”

“Of course. This time I won’t be the one doing it.”

 

 

“You made sure that he’s going to be occupied?” Sharon asked.

“He’s fighting Bobbi for the hand to hand combat field test; trust me, he won’t be in any state to come looking for us for a while. She’s not going to let anything stop her from passing that test, even if she puts him in Medical for a month.” Natasha flipped open the file. “All I’ve been able to say so far is that there’s nothing of recent interest at any of these locations and they’re all places where we’ve carried out ops in the past. This one’s from Budapest; the hill where the birds found us.”

“Is there any pattern? Dates or places? Alphabetical?” Sam squinted at one of the photos. “This is the building where Clint fought Trick Shot.”

“This one’s the hotel where Clint was hiding out just before SHIELD went after him.” Sharon wrote down a few numbers, but paused and stared at the photo. “Sam, do you remember the name of the street the hotel was on?”

“Williams. Bobbi spent a night there a few months later because she liked the look of it. Why?”

“The street name and room number are different. Clint’s room was three-one-five, but the number on this one is six-zero-one.”  
“Carnegie Street… Carnegie Street. There’s no one with the surname or forename Carnegie in the system, but there is a SHIELD building called Carnegie. It’s classed as…” Sam smiled. “Medical.”

 

 

It all came down to something Clint had seen dozens of times since he’d joined SHIELD: a blank door in a hospital that required a certain level of clearance and a SHIELD employee ID badge to get in. He swiped his ID, momentarily surprised that the scraped surface was still recognised.

Steve looked up when the door opened and started to stand, but stopped, apparently confused about what he was supposed to do. He hovered there for a minute, just staring at Clint before he looked from Clint to Phil and back again.

“Oh,” was all he said. Clint watched while he mentally deliberated about whether he should stay or go, before he stood up and walked out, nodding at Clint as he passed him.

There was a scuffle outside the doorway and Clint caught a glimpse of Tony before Steve and Pepper forced him away from the door.

“Give them some privacy, Tony.” Pepper was using her _Listen To Me Or I Will Personally Escort You To Every Meeting You Want To Avoid_ voice. It was her third most threatening one, but it was usually the one that worked. It made Clint feel a bit better about having pretty much kicked Captain America, of all people, out of the hospital room.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” Clint said, choking on _dead_ and swallowing hard. Clint was _supposed to_ kill Natasha, he was _supposed to_ kill Barney, Phil had probably been _supposed to_ stay detached from SHIELD’s latest asset.

 _Supposed to_ was something dangerous when you worked for SHIELD: it was a broken rule, a broken promise, a lie that cracked under the pressure of everything around it.

Phil’s funeral was supposed to be in two weeks, at the church near his house (the one with the daffodils in front of it; Clint had gone to visit it when he’d heard the name) and Clint was supposed to be at an airport, waiting for a flight and getting himself ready to turn up on Phil’s sister’s doorstep and tell the whole story about the robbery.

He thought _I hate you, I hate you, I hate you_ and didn’t mean it, could never mean it. It was impossible to hate him, even when he’d let them believe that he was dead for weeks.

“I know,” Phil said, sliding his fingers through Clint’s short hair. Clint sighed and leaned in until he could press their foreheads together. “Medical used me as one of their guinea pigs, managed to bring me back and fix most of the internal damage.”

It was like being back in that safe house, but Clint wasn’t the one drugged up to his eyeballs with pain meds (and the pain meds weren’t stolen).

It wasn’t the best kiss Clint had ever had. The angle was awkward at best, and leaning forward too far made his ribs ache, and Phil couldn’t lean up very far, but it was still the _best_.

The sound of someone clearing their throat made them both pull away. Natasha was standing in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. Behind her, Darcy was arguing with Hill, claiming _assistant privilege_ and managing to make even more noise than Tony, who had to be further down the hall because he wasn’t loud enough.

“Neither one of you will ever live this down,” was all Natasha said before she stalked off down the hall, probably to break up whatever argument Tony was having with a doctor. Or maybe it was Fury.

“The Avengers are waiting outside,” Darcy said, darting inside, clutching a tablet to her chest like it was made of solid gold. “Sam, Bobbi, Natasha and Sharon are claiming long-term friendship privileges and all coming in at once before the Avengers get anywhere near you.” Clint snorted. “Sitwell is trying to stop Tony and Steve from going after Fury’s other eye, but I think he’s the only one doing that. Thor is calling Jane to ask what the traditional Midgardian gift is when someone comes back from the dead -- I want the recording of that conversation, please tell me you bugged his phone -- and Bruce is having a very calm, very scary conversation with Fury about trading cards that Steve mentioned before him and Tony started planning their attack.”

As Bobbi, Natasha, Sam and Sharon all piled into the room, making various complaints about Fury and Stark, Clint realised something. He hadn’t woken up in Phil’s apartment that day surrounded by something like a family; he’d woken up surrounded by _his_ family, as unconventional (and kind of incestuous) as they were. And now he had an extended family, complete with all the I-don’t-really-know-you shouting and arguing that came with one.

“You did want the Avengers to work together, sir,” Clint said as the noise outside increased, with Stark shouting something.

Phil’s smile was fond and bright, despite the pallor of his skin and his altogether sickly appearance. “Don’t start, Clint.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have any questions or want to leave a comment, but don't want to do it here, I have a tumblr: trusttohaveatruce.tumblr.com.
> 
> There were some scenes that I had to cut because, well, if I'd included everything I wanted to include, it would have been over 100k, so some of those scenes will be going up as missing scenes at some point in the near-ish future.


End file.
